Born in 1946 in Washington, D.C., Kathleen Kilgore spent part of her childhood in nearby Chevy Chase, Maryland, and part of it in Geneva, Switzerland, where she served as translator for her father, a delegate to the General Agreements on Tariff and Trade. She later moved to Boston, married, and became involved in politics.

In 1986 she took charge of Children's Centers, Inc., a social service agency.

An active writer, she has published articles and stories in several magazines and newspapers, including Yankee, Phoenix, New Englander, and the Boston Herald-American. In addition to her novels for young adults, she has been working on a novel about Vietnamese-Americans, as a result of adopting a fourteen-year old refugee from Vietnam in 1981.