Lorna Cook was born in Redwood City, California, but grew up in Detroit and a small town on Lake Michigan. Her trajectory as a writer began, like most, as a reader, and by writing stories, poems, vignettes. However, she didn’t study creative writing, but instead earned a degree in Psychology and Sociology, then spent two years in Philadelphia doing internships at a social services agency for refugees, and another for pregnant teenagers, and 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 was writing 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 lives in Michigan near the lake once more, swimming until it freezes over. She is working on a young adult novel and a screenplay, ever testing the boundaries of where she can go with words.

 

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, then getting better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think ‘There must be something else people do,’ you won’t be able to quit.    —Alice Munro