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This week we kick off a series of interviews with the DK staff, where we'll try to figure out the secret to their success by asking them about their favorite childhood books and what sort of trouble they've been up to lately. Read these interviews carefully--DK's secrets are contained within!

Katy Ball, Publicist

Okay, quick: tell us about yourself, what your favorite book was as a child, and how you ended up as the US Publicist for DK Eyewitness Travel and Rough Guides!

Though I did fall into publishing partially by happenstance, I have always been a voracious reader. Among my favorite early books was Go Dog, Go, which my parents read to me every night for a while. In it, a narrative-free string of scenes involving party-going dogs that drive cars up tree trunks and dogs that ski past each other in increasingly improbable hats parades by in milky blues and poppy reds. My perfectly common but most heartfelt love of entering new worlds-and the local public library's "Book It!" program that kept me rich in Pizza Hut and waterslide park coupons--kept me discovering new authors, which I continue to do, with the curious shadow of my past manias for Christopher Pike, then Tom Robbins, and more recently Lorrie Moore hanging over me. After growing up in San Jose, CA and moving to the East Coast to explore the nooks and crannies of New York while double-majoring in Language and Mind-a poorly orchestrated but very interesting hodge-podge of linguistics, psychology, and philosophy courses-and Spanish, I was offered a job as a Marketing Assistant by Continuum Books.