Biography of Kate Gallison  
Born in Philadelphia, raised in Illinois and New Jersey, Kate Gallison read mystery stories and humor as a child. Early literary influences included Mary Roberts Rinehart, Manning Coles, Jean Shepherd, and George Bernard Shaw.

Kate Gallison considers herself an alumna of Douglass College, although she dropped out in 1960, in her junior year. She worked as a library clerk for the Washington Post and an accounting clerk for the telephone company. After a number of years as a New Jersey housewife, she spent a year clerking in a stationery store and several more as a clerk-bookkeeper for the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services, where she attempted to collect money from the poor.

In 1979 she earned a degree in Humanities from Thomas A. Edison College in Trenton and therefore she was able to qualify for a position with the New Jersey Department of the Treasury as a computer programmer trainee. This led to a career in computers.

Her current series features a young Episcopal priest, Mother Lavinia Grey and Mother Vinnie's efforts to breathe life into the moribund parish of St. Bede's while the murder victims are dropping all around her have been very well received -- by readers both in and out of the church.

Her first novel, Unbalanced Accounts, was set in a mythical state social service bureau, and her second, The Death Tape, took place at the Treasury Department. The third in the Nick Magaracz series, The Jersey Monkey, saw Nick leaving the state and making a break for private industry, as Gallison herself did in 1984, when she took a job as a technical writer for a large New Jersey software house. Until 1994, when she left to write fiction full-time, she juggled the roles of wife, mother, housekeeper, businessperson and author before she left to write fiction full-time in 1994. Kate managed all that, thanks to the support and cooperation of her husband, librarian Harold Dunn, and son John.