Kate was born and raised in Baltimore, MD, and duly forged by the likes of Chicago and New York. She began writing (deeply morose) poetry and stories as a child as a means of one-upping her older brother and currying favor with her parents; (her success in this arena is still TBD). For a while, dear reader, she shifted her one-upmanship to theatre and didn’t study writing in any serious way until her final year of college, where she stumbled into an intermediate poetry workshop and found herself instantly enamored, palm-sweaty and heart-pound-y (this was first love, after all.)   After college, she read and read and read, and, when she wasn’t washing dishes in Second City’s rank kitchen or auditioning for unpaid theatre productions, she was buying endless zines, chapbooks, and story collections at Quimby’s on North Avenue and experimenting with her own weird short fiction, poems, and illustrations. She began tutoring and assisting with storytelling workshops at 826 (a creative writing center for kids ages 6-18) in Chicago, and later, in Brooklyn, where she also facilitated the sale of many superhero capes. Since, she’s worked with high school artists and writers at the Vermont Governor’s Institute on the Arts, led storytelling workshops with Baltimore teens through Art with a Heart’s ‘Art of Leadership’ program, and devised and taught Creative Writing courses for two years to undergrads at UC Riverside.   Much like Rita Mae Brown, she aims to one day (in about 30 years) shift her focus entirely to writing cat-themed murder mysteries.