About Kate
Kate Whouley (hoo’-lee, rhymes with truly) lives and writes on Cape Cod, in the home that inspired her to write Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved. A Book Sense Book-of-the-Year nominee, Cottage for Sale received kudos from reviewers, booksellers, and readers, and is now available in a 20th anniversary edition. Complete with a bright new cover—check out Egypt in the cottage window—the latest edition includes an all-new bonus chapter, catching readers up on the last twenty years with Kate, the cottage, and of course, the WhouleyCats.
Kate was awarded the 2012 New England Book Award in nonfiction for her second memoir, Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words. One of only nineteen university press titles selected for a 2012 American Library Association Best of the Best citation, Remembering the Music is written with the same “good humor and thoughtful humanity” that author and Book-of-the-Month judge Anna Quindlen admired in Cottage for Sale.
“As a writer,” Kate says, “I’m fascinated by human nature—by our limitless spirit and our inescapable mortality, our hopefulness and humor in the face of difficulty, even horror; by the myriad ways that we feel, think, and interact; by how we live, love, and generally operate in the world.”
These fascinations play out in Kate’s writing, and in her work as a teacher and mentor. Kate directs the Bay Path University MFA program and is the editor of Multiplicity, the literary magazine of the MFA. A founding faculty member in the program, she was recognized with the Bay Path Distinguished Teaching award in 2018.
Kate serves as a contributing editor at Yankee magazine, and has written essays and features for the magazine since 2015. Her short work has also appeared in Salon, Multiplicity, Obit, Shelf Awareness, Beyond the Margins, Beacon Broadside, The Boston Globe and The Cape Cod Times.
Is there another book on the way? Happily, yes—and it’s Kate’s genre-jump into fiction. The Maestro and Her Protégé, a novel that was shortlisted for the 2023 Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature (in manuscript) will be published in October 2025 by Blackwater Press. “This one has been a long time coming, with interruptions and delays–life, right?” Kate muses. “But every time I returned to the world inside this book, I found myself desperately wanting to stay. I’m hoping that readers, when they finally get to meet the characters in these pages, will fall just a little bit in love.”
