Catherine Landis was born in Birmingham, Alabama but grew up in Chattanooga. Technically, she grew up on Signal Mountain just outside of Chattanooga.  It's a place a little like Summerville in Some Days There's Pie, her first novel.  She graduated from high school in 1974 and went to Davidson College in NC, graduating from there in 1978 with a BA in English.  Landis was the first woman editor of the college newspaper -- Davidson had just gone co-ed when she started there and she was in the second graduating class of women.  Landis went on to work as a newspaper reporter in New Bern, North Carolina for four years, got married and moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where she worked for a public television station -- first in promotion, then as an assistant producer, "which was a glorified secretary, really," she says..  She covered the Kentucky state legislature for the station plus assisted with an update of its GED instructional series. 

Landis and her family moved to Augusta, Georgia, after that, where she had her first child.  Although she had been writing all her life, she started taking it more seriously in Augusta, which continued after they moved to Knoxville in 1987.  Landis wrote short stories, "mostly unsuccessfully" in her words, although one of them won the Leslie Garrett Award from the Writer's Guild. 

Landis says, "Finally I got the gumption to start a novel -- this was around 1995 -- and that novel was Some Days There's Pie, which was published in May, 2002."  Landis' second novel,  Harvest was published in October of 2004.  She likes to run and hike and read a lot.  She also does some volunteer work, at West High, with Mobile Meals, and with the John Kerry campaign.