About Marla Himeda
Marla Himeda is a lifelong musician and composer who taught piano and clarinet for eighteen years at Punahou Schools and for over half a century in her own studio. She teaches her own theory and composition courses, coaches ensemble groups, composes music, and is a prolific arranger of chamber music for winds. She composes all the music her characters are playing in the audiobook versions of The Bardic Isles Series. She has performed in the Seattle Opera House, the Seattle Art Museum, and many concert venues in Hawaii, where she lives near Mount Olomana, whose twin peaks sparked the birth of Bardic Mountain. She is a member of the National Music Teachers Association, Opus 5 Winds, and is an active member of the Honolulu Wind Ensemble.
Titles in the Bardic Isles Series have won eleven international awards, including the IAN Awards Fantasy Book of the Year and Young Adult Finalist, the IP Awards overall Outstanding Audiobook and Gold Medalist, the Readers’ Favorite Audiobook Gold & Silver Medalist, the B.R.A.G. Medallion Honoree, the BookFest Awards Audiobook Silver Medalist, and The Wishing Shelf Awards Fiction and Audiobook Finalist. The Bardic Isles Series is a merging of two passions—music and writing—and portrays a unique world that the author unabashedly admits loving to escape to. She believes that we should all have a Master Bergid in our lives, and her own life was blessed with three of them: Michiko Miyamoto and Professor Randolph Hokanson, both amazing piano teachers, and Frances Walton, an inspiring Youth Symphony director.
