Catherine Bell grew up in a New England family with a sense of its past as distinguished and its culture superior, as chronicled in many of her short stories. An early reader, she found in fiction that penetrating experience of other people's lives that opens a wider world. The Winsor School, Harvard, and Stanford prepared her to recognize good writing and thinking. She credits work as a gardener, cook, cashier, waitress, and schoolbus driver with teaching her how to actually live in that wider world.

Bell has also worked as a secretary, freelance writer, and therapist. She served as a teacher in the Peace Corps and taught in inner city schools. She has lived in Paris, Brasilia, Nova Scotia, Northern California, and Washington, D.C. Culture clashes, even within families, are often subjects of her fiction. She has published stories in a number of journals, including Midway Journal, Coal City Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Sixfold, Solstice, and South Carolina Review. Her story "Among the Missing" won The Northern Virginia Review's 2014 Prose Award.

She researched and wrote Rush of Shadows, her first novel, over a period of twenty years. After she married a fourth-generation Californian, she fell in love with his home territory, the Coast Range, the bright sunburned hills, dark firs, clear shallow streams, and twisted oaks. But the old barns and wooden churches and redwood train station didn't seem old enough. Something was missing. Where were the traces of the long past? Where were the Indians? There was only the shadow of a story his grandmother passed down to her husband late in life. She was born in 1869 and grew up playing with Indian children whose parents worked on the family ranch. One day the Army came to remove the Indians and march them to the reservation, and that was that. Her friends were gone. She was four years old, but she never forgot.

Bell lives with her husband in Washington, D.C. and visits children and grandchildren in California and Australia. As a teacher at Washington International School, she loves reading great literature with teenagers.

“A vividly imagined historical drama of racial tension on America’s last frontier. . . From its first line—“It was a beautiful country, though I hated and feared it”—Bell’s is a nuanced, intelligently crafted debut. - Kirkus Reviews https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/catherine-bell/rush-of-shadows/”
– Kirkus Reviews