Kathryn Mitchell "Kate" Lucchese 

Known to novel readers as “Cate DeLuca,” to her students as "Dr. K-Z," Kate Lucchese is a classicist, world traveler and cultural geographer who writes.

“Cate” used the international year of COVID sequestration to crack the code of writing novels in a series called Finds & Keepers, recently published by DLG Publishing Partners, LLC. and available from Amazon (see links on this site).

After more than a decade of library research, field work, map making, writing, and translation, Kate’s non-fiction account in English of the 1613-1620 Keicho Mission of Date Masamune A Japanese Mission to 17th Century Rome is finally due out this fall (September 2024) from Lexington Books.

Coming later this year is the same book, more fully illustrated, and in Japanese, 鳳来の夢伊達政宗の慶長遣欧使節 Horai no yume: Date Masamune no Keicho Ken-oh shisetu (“Horai Dream: The Keicho Mission of Masamune Date”)

She has also returned to work on Ourania, Worthy Daughter of Herodes a series of historical novels set in the reign of mad emperor Commodus, which follow the adventures of someone she found in a catacomb near the Via Appia, and the twenty-three other children adopted by a rich sophist to teach his son to read.

Riparia Publications: "Writing From Along the Margins"

"Riparia" is Latin for "things to do with riverbanks," and the kanji characters in red on the logo can be pronounced "kawagishi" meaning "riverbank."  As a woman academic and unclassifiable writer, I exist on the margins, and celebrate all of us Riverbankers getting on with the business of life as the river of history flows by.

Publications

The Finds & Keepers Archaeological Adventure Series, urban fantasy romance novels and novellas featuring archaeologist Tanaquil Greenough and including The Castellina Curse, Short’s Story, Deep Scansion, What Bill is Due, and Place of Sacrifice.

"On the Shores of Sendai-Wan" in youarehere, the journal of creative geography, University of Arizona, 2009

"Landscape Synchesis: A Demeter Temple in Latium," Chapter 9 of Mystic Cults in Magna Graecia, University of Texas Press 2009

Folk Like Me: The Read-Aloud Book of Saints, Morehouse Publishing 2008

Education

Ph.D. in Cultural Geography December 2000 Texas A&M University (TAMU),  Dissertation: "Meaning Through Annihiliation: The Patrimony Bombings of 1993"

M. S. in Geography December 1993 Texas A&M University, Thesis: "The Apotheosis of the Tree: Sanctuary from Grove to Temple"

A.B. cum laude in Classical Languages June 1979 U. C. Berkeley

Graduate of Berkeley High School, Berkeley, CA, June 1974.