About Kim
"Kim Livingston's honesty combined with self-acceptance provides a wonderful, balanced view of living with this type of brain. Every woman that has ADHD or thinks she might should read this book… Walks Like a Duck, is one of the most funny and engaging accounts of ADHD I've ever come across." -Kathleen Nadeau, Ph.D., Founder, and Clinical Director of the Chesapeake ADHD Center; co-author of Understanding Women with ADHD
Kim R. Livingston grew up in Tinley Park, Illinois, a southwest suburb of Chicago. After attending Moraine Valley Community College, she moved away briefly to earn degrees at Western Illinois University and Western Michigan University but then came back to Chicagoland and will probably never leave.
Kim teaches English at Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove, Illinois, and is an advocate of community colleges everywhere. She appreciates that they ask diverse students—high-school hockey players, working grandmas, preschool teachers, strippers, farmers, stay-at-home moms, firefighters, future nurses and cops— to sit in a room together and discuss life’s big ideas, sharing their unique worlds. After thirty years of teaching, she’s still excited every fall.
Growing up, Kim’s family was neurodivergent, and three decades of teaching have made Kim an even more passionate advocate of neurodiversity. She sees value in our differences and understands that intelligence has many faces.
But years ago, wary of the ADHD mental health label, Kim fought her young son's doctor. "We can call it whatever you like," the doctor said. "But if he walks like a duck and talks like a duck, they're all going to know he's a duck."
This English professor grew up spacey and overweight. Drowning in the unrealistic demands of motherhood, Kim stole her son’s ADHD medication and watched it transform her life—for good and bad.
In her first book, Walks Like a Duck, a parenting memoir, Kim candidly shares her stories of Parenting with ADHD, life for women with ADHD symptoms, successful biohacking, and more. Walks Like a Duck is coming in 2023 from TouchPoint Press.
Kim lives in Oswego, Illinois, with two cats, two dogs, and her husband, a retired chemical engineer. Their three kids—a physical therapist, a doctoral student, and a nurse—have mostly flown the coop, and now Kim has time to write. After earning an MFA from Bay Path University in 2020, she admits that the empty nest has its benefits. But above all, she hopes for a life with her adult children nearby: big family dinners every Sunday no matter what, future grandkids running around the kitchen, loud political arguments, the whole deal.
