Katy Koontz

Award-winning travel writer Katy Koontz has written travel books, travel articles, and a travel app. She’s written extensively about the Great Smoky Mountains (near her home in Knoxville, Tennessee), among other destinations both domestic and foreign. Her articles include family travel, adventure travel, spiritual travel, travel health, and consumer-related travel topics. She’s written about driving cantankerous rental cars in Portugal, sleeping in castles in Germany, braving the baths at Esalen in Big Sur, scuba diving in Australia, taking waltzing lessons in Vienna, chasing a dream up a mountain in Jordan, marrying in Greece, and fending off a curious tapir in the Amazon jungle. She has stood atop the carvings on Mount Rushmore, skied in New Zealand, narrowly escaped a mugging in Tanzania, crawled through lava tubes in Iceland, biked the perimeter of Bora Bora, meditated at Machu Picchu, tossed throws from a Krewe of Boo float in New Orleans, and joined in kava ceremonies in Fiji.