Gates’s writing is informed by twenty-nine years of Buddhist mindfulness practice under the guidance of meditation teachers such as Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and more recently, Gil Fronsdal and Ajahn Amaro.  Through preparing talks and interviews for publication, Gates is connected with many of the key voices that are bringing Buddhism to the West. She has conducted interviews with Buddhist teachers from Thich Nhat Hanh and Jon Kabat-Zinn to Gary Snyder and Daniel Goleman. She has edited talks of luminaries from Ram Dass and Robert Thurman to Susan Griffin and Allen Ginsberg.

In her free-lance business as an editor, she has worked with other Buddhist teachers: The Dalai Lama with Dr. Howard Cutler (The Art of Happiness) Joanna Macy (Widening Circles) Jack Kornfield (A Path With Heart) and Sharon Salzberg (Lovingkindness).

Gates’s published works include Changing  Learning, Changing Lives: A High School Women’s Curriculum from the Group School (Feminist Press, 1979) which she co-wrote with Adria Steinberg and Susan Klaw, two of the other teachers with whom she  founded and taught at The Group School in Cambridge. Her articles from Inquiring Mind have been included in anthologies of American Buddhist writings published by Shambhala Publications and North Atlantic Books.  She has been working for the past eight years on researching and writing Already Home. Gates was born in Manhattan in 1946, and grew up between New York City  with her mother and  Williamstown, Massachusetts with her father who  taught at Williams College. She received in B.A. from Bennington College (1967) and her M.A at the University of Education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1978).  She taught high school for twenty years, beginning at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, and most recently at the Urban School of San Francisco. Over the past eighteen years, she has focused on her editing, writing, and raising her now fifteen-year-old daughter. She lives in the Ocean View neighborhood of Berkeley, California with her husband Patrick O'Donnell, her daughter Caitlin and her dog Cleo.