 Ken Yoder Reed calls himself a “refugee Mennonite” who left his heart in southeastern Pennsylvania when he moved to Silicon Valley. His grandparents on both sides—one set, Amish, the other, Old Order Mennonite—drove horse and buggy teams. Ken describes his childhood: “Populated with wonderful cousins and aunts and grandparents. Swarming with cows and rabbits and chickens. Driven by the routines of our dairy and by the discipline of our conservative church. I spent a great deal of my boyhood escaping into novels when I was supposed to be working the fields on the family farm at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains.” 
After graduating from Lancaster Mennonite School, Ken attended Eastern Mennonite College, where he received a B.A. in English Literature and won his first writing award from Atlantic Monthly. He also attended the Japanese Language Institute in Sapporo, Japan, and completed his military alternative service (Vietnam War) as an English teacher in Hokkaido, Japan.
Ken then spent five years in Lancaster as a journalist, publishing his first novel, Mennonite Soldier (Herald Press), two full-length plays produced in Merle and Phyllis Good’s summer stock theatre, numerous investigative articles, dozens of children’s stories, and a monthly column on his family’s life on Haight Street for Christian Living Magazine.
He moved with his family to the San Francisco Bay Area. He says: ‘I knocked around for a couple years, trying to find journalism jobs’. Eventually, Ken founded an international recruiting company, TKO Phoenix, that sources managers for U.S. high-tech firms growing their businesses in Greater China and Korea.
Now a Presbyterian (PCUSA), Ken remains loyal to the servant Jesus he followed as a youth. And he still prefers a capella music and shoofly pie. He and his wife, Patricia, have a blended family with six adult children and one delightful granddaughter, Zoe.
 Ken enjoys swimming, Japanese conversation, international travel and cultures, storytelling for children and directing plays. One of his hobbies is interviewing delightful people to find out why they do what they do. There is no lack of such people in the melting pot of Milpitas, where over 51% are immigrants to the U.S. He writes up their stories in his regular column ‘Our Town’, which appears in the Milpitas Post. Click on picture to read recent columns from 'Our Town'.
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