Kathie Klarreich grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and attended the University of Michigan, where she received her undergraduate degree in 1978 in cultural botany. She briefly worked as a naturalist in Vermont before moving to California, where she went to the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, specializing in illustration. During this period, Kathie Klarreich traveled extensively, and became interested in the fair trade movement of handicrafts.

In 1986, the same year that she opened a non-profit handicrafts store in San Francisco, Kathie visited Haiti, which was still celebrating the overthrow of a 29-year dictatorship. She returned to Haiti in 1988 for two short visits before taking a leave of absence from the store to spend three months there researching the handicraft movement. One week after her arrival she was in the front of the palace at the exact moment a coup d’état took place. It was, as they say, a life-changing moment. Three months morphed into ten years, during which time Kathie learned Creole and French, fell in love with and married a Haitian musician with whom she has a son, and switched professions, becoming a journalist. While in Haiti, Kathie worked for major U.S. media organizations (The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor), radio (Monitor Radio, NPR and Pacifica) and television (NBC, CNN, ABC, CBC, PBS). She is currently living in Miami with her son and continues to write about Haiti for TIME magazine, The Miami Herald and The Christian Science Monitor.