Catherine Marshall enjoyed a thirty-year career helping small businesses and nonprofits thrive. But she discovered writing memoir helped her reflect on how her childhood experiences later affected her ability to choose supportive partners and form a stable family. In 2015, she wrote her first memoir, The Easter Moose: One Family’s Journey Adopting through Foster Care. Her second memoir, No Longer Needed, to be published in 2026, is set in the 1970s when Catherine left a steady job in the Bay Area to be with a handsome, charismatic man, travel through Mexico, and start a business with him. Catherine’s memoirs explore themes of domestic violence, gender roles in marriage, surviving family trauma, heartbreak, and resilience.
Catherine Marshall’s creative nonfiction short stories have been featured in anthologies and magazines including the Noyo River Review, Tales of Our Lies, Fostering Families Today, and the Writers of the Mendocino Coast. She resides with her husband in Mendocino, California, where she provides pro bono technical assistance to local nonprofits and serves on the board of directors for the Writers of the Mendocino Coast.
For most of her career, Catherine Marshall has helped small businesses and nonprofits thrive. She provided training and coaching to small businesses and formed a nonprofit in the San Francisco Bay Area devoted to small business development. From 1997 to 2006, she served as the CEO of the California Association for Micro-Enterprise Opportunity, a statewide coalition of nonprofits supporting business success for low and moderate-income entrepreneurs. She later established a consulting practice to guide communities on how to create their own small business collaboratives. In 2011, she published “Field Building: Your Blueprint for Creating an Effective and Powerful Social Movement.” This book earned an eLIT Gold Medal in 2013 in the Category of Current Events: Social Issues/Public Affairs category. Catherine holds a B.A. in Psychology and an M.A. in Organizational Psychology.