FAQ about Kate
Birth, siblings, etc.
I was born January 17th, 1972, just north of New York City in Westchester County.
I'm the youngest of three; I have an older brother and an older sister. My mother is a librarian, and my father is a civil engineer.
Where did you go to school?
I went to high school in the Bronx, where my mom worked as the school librarian. Then I went to Princeton University.
Did you have any other jobs?
After graduating from college I went to China for a year to teach English. (I never realized what 1.2 billion people actually meant until I moved there. It made New York City seem empty by comparison.)
When I moved back to New York, I got a job in publishing. After a couple of years I left to write a novel, and funnily enough, I ended up selling my book to the same company where I used to work. I've been a full-time writer ever since.
I also used to teach writing at The New School University in New York City.
What are your hobbies?
Not surprisingly, my favorite things have to do with stories: they're reading and going to movies. But aside from that, since I live in New York City I also go to a lot of theater and concerts and I even like opera. But whenever I get out of New York I like to do outdoorsy things: hiking, skiing, scuba diving, horseback riding...
Do you have any special interests?
I am fascinated by science (though not the math part of it-- I like the ideas behind the discoveries.)
Have you always wanted to be a writer?
Yes, I think I’ve always wanted to be a writer. At least since I was about ten. But the funny thing is, I didn’t do a lot of writing. I wanted to be a writer because I loved reading—and I did that all the time. But writing? Not so much. I wrote essays and papers for school. And I kept a kind of journal. I started twenty pages of a novel when I was twelve, but that’s pretty much all the writing I did until college. Princeton had a really good writing program, and I took classes and wrote stories there. I found that at the beginning I needed a deadline to get me going. It was at college that I wrote my first book as well (which is in a drawer at the moment, though I might rewrite it sometime.) I wrote my first published book about three years after I graduated from college, and I’ve been writing ever since.
How many books have you published?
I have six books: four adult thrillers KILL ME FIRST, SAVED, THEY DID IT WITH LOVE, and THROUGH THE HEART and two YA thrillers JUDE and ECHO. I've gotten a couple of questions about the book FRAMED-- the story behind that is that it is actually JUDE, but they renamed it when they published it in the U.K.