The Love Haters

Katherine Center is a best-selling author known for her contemporary romance novels. Center was born Katherine Sherar Panill in Houston, Texas, where she currently resides. After graduating from Vassar College, she completed a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in creative writing at the University of Houston, where she served as an editor at Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Many of her books are set in or feature characters from Houston. Though The Love Haters takes place mostly in Key West, Florida, the protagonist Katie lives and works in an unspecified Texas city before traveling to Florida.

Center wrote her first novel in the sixth grade and began publishing her books in 2006, with The Bright Side of Disaster, after nearly a decade of rejections. Two of her books—The Lost Husband and Happiness for Beginners—have been made into movies, and The Love Haters is her 11th novel. Center has been called “the reigning queen of comfort reads” by BookPage, and she refers to her books as “bittersweet comic novels,” often writing stories about heroines who face struggles in their lives but are still able to find happiness (Center, Katherine.