Perhaps we all had that moment when a teacher’s praise inspired us greatly.

For Kate Evangelista, now a published author, everything started with her teacher telling her she has a knack for writing. Years later, after graduating high school from Southville International School and Colleges (SISC) in 2000, she held on to those encouraging words as she pursued her craft.

“I started getting interested in writing second year in high school at Southville International. My English teacher gave us a writing assignment and I started writing short stories and she said that I had something. I think teachers are really important in that way when they say that you have potential. In your young mind, you think that you can really do something”, Kate shares in an interview with the Manila Bulletin.

The rest of her writing and publishing journey was predictably rough, but Kate patiently waited. Her perseverance was finally rewarded when Crescent Moon Press published her young adult novel, Taste. It tells the story of Phoenix McKay, a student at Barinkoff Academy, who finds herself in the dangerous world of the Night Students. Adding excitement to the plot is Phoenix’s confusion with the desires of her heart and body, as she falls trapped into a deadly secret dating back to ancient civilization.

Taste had its literary debut in the American book market last May 2012, and is now available in Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Amazon. With the book’s good reviews, Kate is keen on publishing her other novels Til Death, Reaping me Softly and Impulse in the future.

As Kate looks back to her roots and expresses gratitude to her alma mater, the Southville community is equally proud of her for making a difference in the field that she has chosen to love.