Kate Whouley’s debut novel, The Maestro and Her Protégé was published in October, 2025 by Blackwater Press. She is also the author of two critically acclaimed memoirs: Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words, winner of the 2012 New England Book Award in nonfiction, and Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved, a 2005 BookSense Book of the Year finalist that was recently released in an expanded 20th anniversary edition.

Kate directs the MFA program in creative writing at Bay Path University, serves as a writer and contributing editor at Yankee magazine, and is the editor-in-chief of Multiplicity, the literary journal of the Bay Path MFA. An avocational musician and the managing director of the Cape Cod Concert Band, Kate traces the inspiration for her historical fiction debut to a long-ago music theory class taught by a demanding professor who was once a student of the famous—and famously formidable—musical master, Nadia Boulanger. Kate lives, writes, plays music, and obeys the current Cat-in-Charge in the cottage that inspired her first memoir.