Catherine Con Morse’s debut novel, THE NOTES, is a 2025 Chinese American Librarians Association Best Book Honorable Mention for Young Adult Fiction, a 2026 Panda Book Award nominee, and was shortlisted for the CRAFT First Chapters contest. Her newest book is THE SUMMER I REMEMBERED EVERYTHING (April 2025). A Kundiman fellow, Catherine received her MFA from Boston University, where she taught undergraduate creative writing for several years. Her work appears in Joyland, Letters, HOOT, Bostonia, and elsewhere, and has been a finalist for the Beacon Street Prize and the Baltimore Review fiction prize. While writing THE NOTES, she was one of the inaugural Writers in Residence at Porter Square Books, where she enjoyed writing in the back office and eating croissants with her cafe discount.

Catherine attended college on a music scholarship at the University of South Carolina, where she received a B.M. in piano performance. She also holds an Ed.M. in Arts in Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education. In high school, Catherine attended the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, a public arts boarding school. While there, she was as intrigued with her piano teacher as Claire is with Dr. Li. Catherine continues to play and occasionally teach piano today. Most recently, she taught English at Choate Rosemary Hall, and lives in the Connecticut River Valley with her husband and daughter.