Catherine Anna Yronwode (née Manfredi; May 12, 1947) is an American writer, editor, graphic designer, typesetter, and publisher with an extensive career in the comic book industry. She is also a practitioner of folk magic. Early life Catherine Anna Manfredi was born in 1947 in San Francisco. Her father was Joseph Manfredi, a Sicilian American abstract artist, and her mother was Liselotte Erlanger, a writer and Ashkenazi Jewish refugee as a member of the Kohn family of Nuremberg, in Nazi Germany. She grew up in Berkeley, California, and Santa Monica, California. She attended Shimer College in Illinois as an early entrant, but dropped out. Returning to Berkeley, she sold the Berkeley Barb underground newspaper on the streets and catalogued rare books for her parents' bookstore. In 1965 she left urban life for rural places. Career Early work Yronwode began writing while in her teens, contributing to science fiction fanzines during the 1960s. She was a member of the Bay Area Astrologers Group, co-writing its weekly astrology column for an underground newspaper, San Francisco Express Times. She produced record reviews on a freelance basis for the nascent Rolling Stone magazine, and short articles on low-tech living for the Whole Earth Catalog and Country Women magazine. While in jail for growing marijuana, she wrote about her experiences ("Letters from Jail") for the Spokane Natural an underground newspaper. With her mother Liselotte Glozer, Catherine co-wrote and hand-lettered the faux-medieval cookbook, My Lady's Closet Opened and the Secret of Baking Revealed by Two Gentlewomen (Glozer's Booksellers, 1969). In 1969 she and her then-partner Peter Paskin created the joint name "Yronwode" and all of her subsequent work has been published under that surname. She generally styles her name in lower case, as "catherine yronwode." Comics and trading cards While unemployed in 1977, Yronwode created a magico-religious index to the Marvel Doctor Strange comics called the Lesser Book of the Vishanti; she later published parts of it in various small presses and it is posted on her website in updated form. Marvel writers are said to have consulted it. In 1980, Yronwode began work at Ken Pierce Books, editing and writing introductions to a line of comic strip reprint books. Titles included Modesty Blaise by Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway, Mike Hammer by Mickey Spillane, and The Phantom by Lee Falk. Also in 1980 Yronwode succeeded Murray Bishoff as news reporter for Comics Buyer's Guide and