Elizabeth Crook
I grew up mostly in San Marcos, Texas, (with a brief time away in Washington D.C and Australia) graduated from San Marcos High School, attended Baylor and Rice, moved for a while to New Braunfels, Texas, and now live in Austin. One of the great blessings of my childhood was having a mother who read to my brother and sister and me for hours every night, long after we could read for ourselves. Those nights of listening transported us to foreign places and other centuries and allowed us to connect with characters living lives in stark contrast to our own. This was a great gift my mother gave us.
I've written six novels, including The Night Journal, which received The Spur Award from Western Writers of America and the Willa Literary Award from W
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Growing up in the Appalachian mountains of southwestern Virginia, nine-year-old Lee Smith was already writing--and selling, for a nickel apiece--stories about her neighbors in the coal boomtown of Grundy and the nearby isolated "hollers." Since 1968, she has published eleven novels, as well as three collections of short stories, and has received many writing awards.
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The sense of place infusing her novels reveals her insight into and empathy for the people and culture of Appalachia. Lee Smith was born in 1944 in Grundy, Virginia, a small coal-mining town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, not 10 miles from the Kentucky border. The Smith home sat on Main Street, and the Levisa River ran just behind it. Her mother, Virginia, was a college graduate wh -
Susan Henderson
Susan Henderson is a Hawthornden International Fellow, a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Award. She is the author of the novels Up from the Blue and The Flicker of Old Dreams, both published by HarperCollins. Her latest is a Montana Book Award Honor Book and winner of the High Plains Book Award for Fiction, the WILLA Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction, and the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Western Contemporary Novel. Susan is a lifetime member of the National Book Critics Circle and the NAACP. She lives in New York and blogs at the writer support group, LitPark.com.
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Kelly Brenner
KELLY BRENNER is a naturalist, photographer and writer based in Seattle. She is the author of Nature Obscura: A City's Hidden Natural World which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and the Pacific Northwest Book Awards. Her freelance work has been published in Popular Science, National Wildlife Magazine, and The Open Notebook, among others. On her website, she writes about urban nature, wildlife habitat design, books, poetry, folklore, and a variety of other natural history topics. Learn more at metrofieldguide.com.
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Aaron Gwyn
Aaron Gwyn was raised on a cattle ranch in rural Oklahoma. He is the author of a story collection, Dog on the Cross (finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award), and two novels, The World Beneath (W.W. Norton), and Wynne’s War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). His short stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in Esquire, McSweeney’s, Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, and New Stories from the South. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina where he is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.
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Paul Howarth
Paul Howarth is a British-Australian author and former lawyer who holds an MA in creative writing from UEA, where he was awarded the Malcolm Bradbury Scholarship. In 2018 his debut novel, Only Killers and Thieves, was published to international acclaim, winning the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for best fiction, and appearing on numerous other awards and books of the year lists. His second novel, Dust Off the Bones, was published in Summer 2021 to starred reviews by Kirkus and Publishers Weekly, and was named a Book of the Month by both the Times and Sunday Times.
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Steve Jenkins
Steve Jenkins is a Canadian realtor. In 2012 he and his partner Derek Walter adopted what they thought was a mini pig, who turned out to be a full-sized commercial sow. Since then, Esther the Wonder Pig has become a social media sensation and the couple has opened Happily Ever Esther Farm Sanctuary.
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Carole King
Carole King is an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. She was most active as a singer during the first half of the 1970s, though she was a successful songwriter for considerably longer both before and after this period.
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King has won four Grammy Awards and has been inducted into both the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for her songwriting, along with long-time partner Gerry Goffin. -
Amanda Skenandore
Amanda Skenandore is an award-winning author of historical fiction and a registered nurse. Her books have been translated into multiple languages and garnered accolades from the American Library Association, Reader’s Digest, Silicon Valley Reads, and Apple Books. She is a 2024 Nevada Arts Council’s literary fellow. Amanda lives in Las Vegas with her husband and their pet turtle, Lenore.
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Yeonmi Park
Park Yeon-mi (Korean: 박연미) is a North Korean defector and human rights activist who escaped from North Korea to China in 2007 and settled in South Korea in 2009, before moving to the United States in 2014. She came from an educated, politically connected family that turned to black market trading during North Korea's economic collapse in the 1990s. After her father was sent to a labor camp for smuggling, her family faced starvation. They fled to China, where Park and her mother fell into the hands of human traffickers and was sold into slavery before escaping to Mongolia. She is now an advocate for victims of human trafficking in China and works to promote human rights in North Korea and around the globe.
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Park rose to global prominence after -
J.A. Jance
Judith Ann Jance is the top 10 New York Times bestselling author of the Joanna Brady series; the J. P. Beaumont series; three interrelated thrillers featuring the Walker family; and Edge of Evil, the first in a series featuring Ali Reynolds. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.
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Series:
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* Joanna Brady
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Ruta Sepetys
#1 New York Times Bestselling Author and Winner of the Carnegie Medal.
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Ruta Sepetys was born and raised in Michigan in a family of artists, readers, and music lovers. The daughter of a refugee, Ruta is drawn to underrepresented stories of strength through struggle and hopes to give voice to those who weren't able to tell their story. Her award-winning historical novels are published in over sixty countries and have received over forty literary prizes.
For more information:
https://www.rutasepetys.com
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Andrea Eames
Andrea Eames was born in 1985. She was brought up in Zimbabwe, where she attended a Jewish school for six years, a Hindu school for one, a Catholic convent school for two and a half, and then the American International School in Harare for two years. Andrea's family moved to New Zealand in 2002. Andrea has worked as a bookseller and editor and now lives in Austin, Texas with her husband.
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Lynda Rutledge
Lynda Rutledge is the bestselling author of "West with Giraffes," selected by Library of Congress-affiliated Texas Center for the Book as their 2023 Great Read and translated into 15 languages. She’s also the author of "Faith Bass Darling's Last Garage Sale," winner of the 2013 Writers League of Texas Fiction Award which was adapted into the major 2019 French film "La deniére folie de Claire Darling" starring Catherine Deneuve. Her fiction has won awards and residencies from Atlantic Center for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation, among many others.
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Her latest novel, "Mockingbird Summer," set in a tiny segregated town in 1964 on the eve of massive cultural change, explores the impact of great books, the burden of potentia -
Kate Carlisle
Golden Heart and Daphne du Maurier Award winning author Kate Carlisle spent over twenty years working in television production as an Associate Director for game and variety shows, including The Midnight Special, Solid Gold and The Gong Show. She traveled the world as a Dating Game chaperone and performed strange acts of silliness on The Gong Show. She also studied acting and singing, toiled in vineyards, collected books, joined a commune, sold fried chicken, modeled spring fashions and worked for a cruise ship line, but it was the year she spent in law school that finally drove her to begin writing fiction. It seemed the safest way to kill off her professors. Those professors are breathing easier now that Kate spends most of her time writin
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Rachel Kushner
Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of three novels: the Booker Prize- and NBCC Award–shortlisted The Mars Room; The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times top ten book of 2013; and Telex from Cuba, a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been awarded prizes and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her novels are translated into 26 languages. She lives in Los Angeles and wants you to know that if you're reading this and curious about Rachel, whatever is unique and noteworthy in her biography that you might want to find out about is in her new book, The Hard Crowd, which will be published in April 2021. An excerpt of it appeared in the New Yo
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Elinor Lipman
I love talking with readers - for 1:1s and Book Club visits, find me on Skolay: www.skolay.com/writers/elinor-lipman
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Elinor Lipman is the author of 14 humorous novels about contemporary American society; essay and short story collections. Born and raised in Lowell, MA, she divides her time between Manhattan and the Hudson Valley of New York. She received the New England Book award for fiction in 2001. Her first novel, "Then She Found Me," was adapted for the screen, starring Helen Hunt, Bette Midler, Colin Firth and Matthew Broderick. Her fourth novel, "The Inn at Lake Devine" was adapted for the off-off Broadway stage by Tongue in Cheek Theater. In 2011-2012, she held the Elizabeth Drew chair in creative writing at Smith College. Her novel, -
Joseph Finder
Joseph Finder is the author of the forthcoming novel JUDGMENT and fourteen other novels, many of them New York Times bestsellers, published in 35 countries around the world. His book HIGH CRIMES was adapted into a movie starring Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd; PARANOIA was made into the Harrison Ford/Gary Oldman film.
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He was born in Chicago, lived in the Philippines, Afghanistan, Washington State, and upstate New York. His novels have won numerous awards, including the Strand Critics award, the Barry Award, and the International Thriller Writers’ Thriller Award for best novel. His first novel, THE MOSCOW CLUB, was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the 10 best spy novels of all time.
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Susan Meissner
Susan Meissner is a USA Today bestselling novelist with more than a million books in the hands of readers, and in eighteen languages. Her critically acclaimed works of historical fiction have been named to numerous lists including Publishers Weekly’s annual roster of 100 best books, Library Reads Top Picks, Real Simple annual tally of best books, Goodreads Readers’ Choice awards, Booklist’s Top Ten, and Book of the Month.
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She attended Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego and is a former managing editor of a weekly newspaper. Susan’s expertise as a storyteller and her thoroughly researched topics make her a favorite author of book clubs everywhere. Her engaging and warm speaking style appeal to all manner of women’s groups, literary o -
Mary Kay Andrews
https://marykayandrews.com/
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MARY KAY ANDREWS is the New York Times bestselling author of 30 novels (including The Homewreckers, The Santa Suit, The Newcomer; Hello, Summer; Sunset Beach; The High Tide Club; The Weekenders; Beach Town; Save the Date; Ladies’ Night; Christmas Bliss; Spring Fever; Summer Rental; The Fixer Upper; Deep Dish; Blue Christmas; Savannah Breeze; Hissy Fit; Little Bitty Lies; and Savannah Blues), and one cookbook, The Beach House Cookbook.
A native of St. Petersburg, Florida, she earned a B.A. in journalism from The University of Georgia. After a 14-year career working as a reporter at newspapers including The Savannah Morning News, The Mari -
Lisa Unger
Lisa Unger is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of twenty-three novels, including her upcoming release SERVED HIM RIGHT (March, 2026). With books published in thirty-three languages and millions of copies sold worldwide, she is regarded as a master of suspense.
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Unger’s critically acclaimed novels have been featured on “Best Book” lists from the Today show, Good Morning America, Entertainment Weekly, People, Amazon, Goodreads, L.A. Times, The Boston Globe, Sun Sentinel, Tampa Bay Times, and many others. She has been nominated for, or won, numerous awards including the Strand Critics, Audie, Hammett, Macavity, ITW Thriller, and Goodreads Choice. In 2019, she received two Edgar Award nominations in the same year, an hon -
Lisa Jackson
Lisa Jackson is the number-one New York Times bestselling author of over ninety-five novels, including the Rick Bentz and Reuben Montoya Series, the Pescoli and Alvarez Series, the Savannah series, and numerous stand alone novels. She also is the co-author of One Last Breath, Last Girl Standing, and the Colony Series, written with her sister and bestselling author Nancy Bush, as well as the collaborative novels Sinister and Ominous, written with Nancy Bush and Rosalind Noonan. There are over thirty million copies of her novels in print and her writing has been translated into twenty languages.
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Before she became a nationally bestselling author, she was a mother struggling to keep food on the table by writing novels, hoping against hope that s -
Sandra Brown
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Sandra Brown is the author of more than sixty New York Times bestsellers, including STING (2016), FRICTION (2015), MEAN STREAK (2014), DEADLINE(2013), & LOW PRESSURE (2012), LETHAL (2011).
Brown began her writing career in 1981 and since then has published over seventy novels, bringing the number of copies of her books in print worldwide to upwards of eighty million. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.
In 2009 Brown detoured from romantic suspense to write, Rainwater, a much acclaimed, powerfully moving historical fiction story about honor and sacrifice during the Great Depression.
Brown was given -
Erik Larson
Erik Larson is the author of nine books and one audio-only novella. His latest book, The Demon of Unrest, is a non-fiction thriller about the five months between Lincoln’s election and the start of the Civil War. Six of his books became New York Times bestsellers. Two of these, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz and Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, both hit no. 1 on the list soon after launch. His chronicle of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, The Devil in the White City, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and won an Edgar Award for fact-crime writing. It lingered on various Times bestseller lists for the better part of a decade and is currently in development at Disn
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Chris Bohjalian
Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 25 books. His 25th book, THE JACKAL’S MISTRESS, is now on sale. He writes literary fiction, historical fiction, thrillers, and (on occasion) ghost stories. His goal is never to write the same book twice. He has published somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.5 million words.
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His work has been translated into 35 languages and become three movies (MIDWIVES, SECRETS OF EDEN, and PAST THE BLEACHERS) and an Emmy-winning TV series (THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT). He has two other novels in development for TV series as well.
He is also a playwright, including THE CLUB in 2024; MIDWIVES in 2020; and GROUNDED (now WINGSPAN) in 2018.
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Jayne Ann Krentz
The author of over 50 consecutive New York Times bestsellers, JAYNE ANN KRENTZ writes romantic-suspense in three different worlds: Contemporary (as Jayne Ann Krentz), historical (as Amanda Quick) and futuristic (as Jayne Castle). There are over 30 million copies of her books in print.
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She earned a B.A. in History from the University of California at Santa Cruz and went on to obtain a Masters degree in Library Science from San Jose State University in California. Before she began writing full time she worked as a librarian in both academic and corporate libraries. -
Larry McMurtry
Larry Jeff McMurtry was an American novelist, essayist, and screenwriter whose work was predominantly set in either the Old West or contemporary Texas. His novels included Horseman, Pass By (1962), The Last Picture Show (1966), and Terms of Endearment (1975), which were adapted into films. Films adapted from McMurtry's works earned 34 Oscar nominations (13 wins). He was also a prominent book collector and bookseller.
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His 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove was adapted into a television miniseries that earned 18 Emmy Award nominations (seven wins). The subsequent three novels in his Lonesome Dove series were adapted as three more miniseries, earning eight more Emmy nominations. McMurtry and co-writer Diana Ossana adapted the scre -
Robert Harris
ROBERT HARRIS is the author of nine best-selling novels: Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, Imperium, The Ghost Writer, Conspirata, The Fear Index, and An Officer and a Spy. Several of his books have been adapted to film, most recently The Ghost Writer, directed by Roman Polanski. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages. He lives in the village of Kintbury, England, with his wife, Gill Hornby.
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Jayne Anne Phillips
JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS is the author of Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, MotherKind, Lark and Termite, and Quiet Dell. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bunting Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Winner of an Arts and Letters Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2018. A National Book Award finalist, and twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, she lives in New York and Boston.
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Margret Wittmer
Margret Wittmer, the oldest settler in Galapagos, passed away on March 21, 2000 after spending a full life on the Island of Floreana. She arrived in 1932 from Germany with her husband Heinz, a 12 year old stepson Harry, and two Alsatian dogs Hertha and Lump. She also arrived pregnant and gave birth to her own two children on the island. The Wittmers started out in a pirate cave in the highlands of Floreana, moved later to a lava hut with a goat skin roof, and finally to a "Baltra Pine" house on the coast at Black Beach. Her life was an incredible mixture of adventures from her experiences with the Baronessa to the more mundane of raising a family on a desert island. The Wittmers were visited by such personalities as Franklin and Eleanor Roo
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Dorothy Baker
Dorothy Baker (1907–1968) was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1907 and raised in California. After graduating from UCLA , she traveled in France, where she began a novel and, in 1930, married the poet Howard Baker. The couple moved back to California, and Baker completed an MA in French, later teaching at a private school. After having a few short stories published, she turned to writing full time, despite, she would later claim, being “seriously hampered by an abject admiration for Ernest Hemingway.” In 1938, she published Young Man with a Horn, which was awarded the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942 and, the next year, published Trio, a novel whose frank portrayal of a lesbi
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Thomas Savage
Thomas Savage was an American author of novels published between 1944 and 1988. He is best known for his Western novels, which drew on early experiences in the American West.
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Douglas Nicholas
Douglas Nicholas is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in numerous publications, among them Atlanta Review, Southern Poetry Review, Sonora Review, Circumference, A Different Drummer, and Cumberland Review, as well as the South Coast Poetry Journal, where he won a prize in that publication's Fifth Annual Poetry Contest.
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Other awards include Honorable Mention in the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation 2003 Prize For Poetry Awards, second place in the 2002 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards from PCCC, International Merit Award in Atlanta Review's Poetry 2002 competition, finalist in the 1996 Emily Dickinson Award in Poetry competition, honorable mention in the 1992 Scottish International Open Poetry Competition, first prize in the journa -
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Ye Chun
Ye Chun / 叶春 (Surname: Ye) is a bilingual Chinese American writer and literary translator. She was born in Luoyang, China and came to the U.S. in 1999. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. She is the author of Straw Dogs of the Universe (a novel), Hao (stories), two books of poetry, Travel Over Water and Lantern Puzzle, and a novel in Chinese,《海上的桃树》(Peach Tree in the Sea).
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She has published four volumes of translations, including Ripened Wheat: Selected Poems of Hai Zi, shortlisted for the 2016 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Award, and Long River: Poems by Yang Jian. Her translations of Li-Young Lee's Behind My Eyes and Undressing,《眼睛后面: 李 -
Constance Beresford-Howe
Constance Beresford-Howe was born in Montreal. She received her M.A. from McGill University in 1946 and her Ph.D. from Brown University in 1950. She taught English literature and creative writing at McGill until 1969, then moved to Toronto, Ontario where she taught at Ryerson until her retirement in 1988. Her first novel, The Unreasoning Heart, was published while she was still a student.
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Ms Beresford-Howe died in a hospice in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk England, on Jan. 20, 2016 at the age of 93. -
Jincy Willett
From the author's website: "An aging, bitter, unpleasant woman living in Escondido, California, who spends her days parsing the sentences of total strangers and her nights teaching and writing. Sometimes, late at night, in the dark, she laughs inappropriately." This is also the short bio on her character, Amy Gallup, on her blog in "The Writing Class."
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Katharine S. White
Katharine White worked at the New Yorker for more than 35 years. She began as a reader of manuscripts and ended her career there as a valued editor. She never became as well known as her husband, E.B. White, but her influence on the magazine was enormous. To many of her authors (among whom were John Updike, Jean Stafford, Nadine Gordimer, S.N. Behrman) she was a mother figure and a treasured friend.
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S.M. Hulse
S. M. Hulse received her M.F.A. from the University of Oregon and was a fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her stories have appeared in Willow Springs, Witness, and Salamander. A horsewoman and fiddler, she has spent time in Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon.
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Natalie Musgrave Dossett
Natalie grew up in San Antonio, spending a great deal of time on family ranches in deep South Texas, a place her great-grandmother referred to as an acquired taste. A seventh-generation Texan, Natalie was raised on tales (most of them tall) of the Wild Horse Desert. Her love of history and writing was nurtured by wonderful high school teachers, and strengthened while earning a BA in History at Vanderbilt University. She lives in Dallas and enjoys a large, growing family with her husband. Natalie's novel, Sarita, is a 2025 WWA Spur Award Finalist.
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