Kate Dike Blair grew up in The Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury, Vermont. She fondly remembers at the age of four, hiding under the best-sellers table and guessing customers’ identities by their shoes, at twelve, spending Sunday mornings reading Little Women while her father and genial proprietor Dike Blair processed special orders (no Internet!), and lunching with Robert Frost. After ten years treading the boards of local community theaters, she earned her Diploma in Theater Arts from the Wykeham Rise School for Girls in 1971.

She graduated from Boston University with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature in 1975 and clerked in Boston book shops before earning her Certificate of Medical Assisting in 1979. Specializing in occupational health, she created with two partners the company Health Research Associates, and taught NIOSH Approved Spirometry to hundreds of health professionals at BU and Harvard.

In 1987, she helped launch Ponderings, a newsletter for the Friends of White Pond, a local lake association. In 2004, she joined the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA. When her father died in 2009, she discovered in his effects his research regarding their Hawthorne and Dike ancestors and the Henry Clay steamship disaster. While her father focused on straightforward history, she envisioned a complicated love story, and her quest for cousin Louisa Hawthorne’s true fate began.   

Kate now juggles writing books, plays and newsletters, medical consulting, and performing on stages and screens large and small.  She resides with her family in Concord, Massachusetts.