Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Katherine graduated from Vanderbilt University with a B.A. in English and earned a Ph.D. in medieval studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She worked in the publicity department of the New Orleans Public Schools, taught in the expository writing program at Yale University, and served as the executive editor of the book publishing program of the Council on East Asian Studies at Harvard University. She now lives in Western Massachusetts with her husband, John Keenum, and a Pembroke Welsh Corgi. Where the Light Falls is her first published work of fiction. She is working on a second historical novel, Anonymity, which is set in New York City in the early twentieth century. Its heroine is involved in children’s book publishing, the women’s suffrage movement, and an illicit love affair.