Catherine was born in Birmingham but grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, mostly on Signal Mountain. There she spent hours playing under the rhododendrons, wandering through the woods, and sitting on a rock overlooking the valley, where she wrote her first poems and dreamed of becoming a writer.
In 1978 she graduated with a BA in English from Davidson College, where she was the first woman editor of the college newspaper. She went on to a career in journalism in New Bern, North Carolina, before moving to Lexington, Kentucky, where she worked in marketing and then production at Kentucky Educational Television.
Her first novel, SOME DAYS THERE’S PIE was published in 2002. Her second, HARVEST, in 2004. TWO TRAINS LEAVE THE STATION: A Meditation on Aging, Alzheimer’s, and Arithmetic, and A PLAGUE OF GODS both were published in 2022.
She has served on the board of local Planned Parenthood affiliates and as a volunteer for the Knox County Democratic Party. Her love of the outdoors has made her champion of environmental causes. Her love for books and writers and human beings has made her a champion of independent bookstores.
She is the mother of two sons and the grandmother of two grandsons and is the lucky beneficiary of magnificent daughters-in-law. She lives with her husband in Knoxville, Tennessee.