Growing up in the suburbs of Boston, Cat’s high school years were filled with field hockey and violin. She started at Harvard as a Music and Physics major, but quickly realized that her true passion was in reading, prompting a switch to a joint major in English Literature and Music. In college, Cat’s first job was editing college and graduate school application essays.

After graduating, Cat moved to South Africa to study southern African literature, thanks to a grant from the Harvard English department. She fell in love with Cape Town, staying for three years to complete an MA in English Literature while working for a literary journal and a renowned drag artist/activist. It was also during this time that Cat began tutoring the SAT.

In 2011, Cat returned to Boston, where she briefly worked in wealth management before co-founding an experimental theater company. She taught writing to high school and college students, continued tutoring the SAT, and worked in cafes and restaurants. All the while, she began writing fiction more seriously.

In 2015, Cat moved to New York City to pursue an MFA in fiction writing at Columbia University. In Manhattan, she was accepted to an extraordinarily prominent and selective Test Prep company, where she began teaching the GRE. Since then, Cat has helped hundreds of students achieve their Grad School goals, trained dozens of high caliber teachers, and developed, co-wrote, and produced an asynchronous online GRE course.

Cat’s short fiction has been published in numerous journals. She won The Missouri Review’s 2019 prize for best story in a volume year and was a finalist for a 2023 Shirley Jackson Award. After nine years in New York, Cat recently relocated to Philadelphia, where she lives with her partner, her dog, and fifty houseplants. In her free time, she enjoys ceramics, pole dancing, surfing, and riding motorcycles.