Athena Ahlroth
Written by my loving sisters ❤️
Adventure, innovation, and the unusual. One day you can find her dancing around a messy kitchen with new sugary dishing flying from oven to fridge and back again, and the next she’s covered in soot and grease bent over an uncooperative engine or steering box. As a child, Athena developed a love for creating. She had a thriving cast of imaginary friends and doodled characters, many of whom starred in her early crayon-drawn short stories that mimicked the comics she so loved at a young age. Next to that, she began to experiment with the culinary arts, and now has family classics like her famous three-cheese bacon quiche to her cookie-dough injected buttercream cupcakes. Her fascination also branched into the mysterious and fantastical. Often times, she was pouring over dinosaur books and researching mythology and cryptids, these themes later went on to impact her professional literary work. Another passion that has been fostered since her youth is her heart for animals and rescue, particularly in the field of livestock rescue and rehabilitation. Although her dream is to open a pig sanctuary, Athena has helped work with goats, rescued both cats and dogs, and done foster for hoarding cases with rabbits.
In her more recent years, Athena has begun to further her other new interests such as modeling. The camera proved to be another platform to capture her thoughts and ideas, and she learned to tell stories through emotion. Coincidentally, after doing so many car model jobs, her curiosity was turned to what was hidden under the hood. An automotive program at SBCC later, and she was honing cylinders in engines and going home with dirt under her nails. This lead to her current day job as a mechanic building highly specialized machines that help large scale bakers portion their goods, thus combing two of her foremost passions. During her spare time, Athena is with her dogs hiking her favorite local preserve, or trying out a new, exciting recipe or just sitting down to work on her writing projects.
Inspiration comes in many forms and for Athena it was the authors from her childhood. Richard Adams’ Watership down was and continues to be Athena’s literary role model, and C.S. Lewis has played an overwhelming part in her literary style. However, she also draws heavy inspiration from her home town. Athena was born and raised in the beautiful mediterranean-style Santa Barbara, California. Athena would see the rolling mountains decorated with desert flowers and the shadow of her dragons fly overhead, or she would watch a perfect stretch of clear beach and endless ocean and see the webbed spines of some water drake peek above the waves. Being surrounded by this beautiful landscape made her feel like she herself lived in a fairy tale and it was her job to discover its characters.
Athena is a perfectly imperfect person. From riding in her 1990 Bronco to serving up more sweets than her family can keep up with, from her future pig rescue to life behind the camera, Athena uses all her passions and experiences to pour herself into her books. This is a window into her unleashed, unpredictable imagination that connects the worlds in her mind to the world she experiences.