Lorna Cook was born in Redwood City, California, and grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. An avid reader, she began in adolescence experimenting with poems, stories, and vignettes of characters. In college, she earned a degree in Psychology and Sociology, an education in what makes people behave the way they do, which ultimately helped shape her fiction. She spent two years in Philadelphia doing internships with a refugee agency, and a program assisting pregnant teenagers, while also waiting tables at a famous Irish pub. After working at a shelter for runaways and a group home for teenage girls, she moved to Washington, D.C. and spent several years as a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill. All the while, she wrote short stories in her spare time. After one hundred rejection letters, she concluded that short fiction simply wasn’t her genre and began writing novels…

Married with two grown sons, she now lives near Lake Michigan, swimming until it freezes over. Whenever possible, she travels in order to feel unmoored and challenged; and volunteers in her community. She is working on a fourth novel and a screenplay, exploring new ways to tell stories.

“If you’re going to be a writer you’ll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write….and even when you get old and think ‘There must be something else people do,’ you won’t be able to quit.”   — Alice Munro