Mary Kate has been a publicist for trade and scholarly presses for over two decades. After graduating cum laude from Mount Holyoke College, where she completed an internship at Houghton Mifflin, she entered the field as a corporate PR assistant at Simon & Schuster in 1991. She became a publicist at William Morrow in 1992, after which she made the switch to scholarly publishing at Yale University Press in 1994. From there she moved on to Oxford University Press as a Senior Publicist (1995-1996); Princeton University Press as Publicity Director (1996-1999); Harvard University Press as Publicity Director (1999-2009); and Stanford University Press as Publicity and Public Relations Manager (2010-2016). After freelancing as an arts and literary publicist (2017), and a development and fundraising leader, (2018-2019), she returned to academic publishing as a publicist a UVAP in 2022.