Beth Cato (1980-) is originally from Hanford, California, but currently lives and writes in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. She shares the household, to quote Cato herself, "with a hockey-loving husband, a numbers-obsessed son, and a cat the size of a canned ham."

Cato has written a large and impressive body of short fiction (over 60 stories) and poetry, which has been published in a number of magazines, including Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Mythic Delirum, Nature Magazine, and many others. Much of her short fiction was collected in Red Dust and Dancing Horses and Other Stories, published by Fairwood Press in 2017. She has been nominated for multiple Rhysling Awards, and her 2019 poem "After Her Brother Ripped the Heads from Her Paper Dolls" won the 2019 Rhysling for Short Poem. Additionally, her poem "he scores" was nominated for the 2021 Aurora Award for Best Poem/Song-English.

Cato's first novel, released in 2014, was The Clockwork Dagger, a rousing fantasy adventure with heavy elements of steampunk. The sequel, The Clockwork Crown, was released in 2015. Cato's novella Wings of Sorrow and Bone, set in her Clockwork Dagger universe, was nominated for a 2016 Nebula Award for Best Novella. Two additional stories, Final Flight and Deep Roots were released in 2016.

Her latest series, the fantasy Breath Of Earth, which is set in an alternate 1906 San Francisco, was released in fall 2016, and nominated for the 2017 Dragon Award for Best Alternate History. The novel has two sequels: Call of Fire, published in late 2017, and Roar of Sky in 2018.