Cates spent five years navigating Chicago’s transit and weather systems before moving to Oregon and earning her MFA in Creative Writing from Oregon State University. Strongly influenced by her degrees in philosophy and psychology, Cates writes around themes of personhood, the distance between self and other, and matters of free will. Author of novels Juxtaposed, and M-THEORY (Baobab 2021), and the founding editor of Townsend, a literary journal devoted to long-form fiction writers.