Caletti was a longtime resident of Issaquah, Washington, where she set many of her books as the fictional town of "Nine Mile Falls."

[3] A passionate reader and writer from an early age, Caletti only started focusing seriously on her writing after her youngest child turned two.

Though she had studied journalism at the University of Washington, receiving some recognition for playwriting, Caletti feared that a career in creative writing would be too difficult.

Written originally for adults, Queen was published in the young adult market, and received positive reviews, including a starred review in Publishers Weekly (Nov. 2012)[5] and named to the Children's Book Committee (CBC) of Bank Street College of Education's Best Children's Book of the Year list (2003).

[7] Based on a van Gogh painting, Caletti’s next novel Wild Roses was published in 2005, and was a 2006 finalist for the Washington State Book Award.

Following the success of her first three novels in three years, Caletti then went on to write The Nature of Jade (2007), The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (2008), The Secret Life of Prince Charming (2009), The Six Rules of Maybe (2010), Stay (2011), and The Story of Us in 2012.

Caletti’s next venture was a much-anticipated adult fiction novel titled He’s Gone, released by Random House in 2013.

In additional, it won the Josette Frank Award for Fiction from the CBC and named to its Best Children's Book of the Year list with Outstanding Merit.

The first title of hers to be translated into German (in 2022), it was nominated in March 2023 by the youth jury in a category of the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis which will be awarded in October.

[11] "Self discovery, finding home, dealing with being a mostly good hearted but flawed person in a complicated world, those are all repeating themes in my work… Writing is always my therapy – the attempt to work out particular events and questions I’m trying to understand.

It is my aim to show the world as it is in all of its beauty and messiness and variety and wackiness and rare moments of perfection.