Kim Bancroft earned a B.A. in English from Stanford, an M.A. in English and a teaching credential from San Francisco State University, and a doctorate in education from UC Berkeley. She has taught at high schools and community colleges in the Bay Area, at the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico, and at Sacramento State. In 2014 Kim edited the 1890 autobiography of her great-great-grandfather, Hubert Howe Bancroft, founder of the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley. Her edited version was published by Heyday Books, titled Literary Industries: Chasing the Vanishing West. She also wrote a biography of the founder of Heyday Books, called The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher. Her newest book is called Writing Themselves into History: Emily and Matilda Bancroft in Journals and Letters, which covers the literary lives of the two wives of H.H. Bancroft.