Susan Gregg Gilmore was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1961. Although her artist mother bought her daughter her first easel and box of paints when she was five, it was her fatherβs love of family storytelling that captured their young daughterβs attention.
Gregg Gilmore knew at an early age that she wanted to write but was soon drawn to journalism not fiction. While at the University of Virginia, she wrote for the student paper, The Cavalier Daily, and held an internship at the Nashville Banner. But after graduation, her interests shifted to museum work and she took a secretarial position with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
A year later, she entered graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin where she earned a Masters of Arts in American Studies. Still drawn to the written word, she asked one of her professors what she should do at this point with her writing. He told her she needed to live life first.
So she did. She married in 1983 and, with her husband, Dan, raised three daughters.
She has since made hundreds of cupcakes for bake sales, chaired school book fairs, and taught Vacation Bible School all the while writing for papers including the Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor and the Chattanooga News-Free Press. While on staff at the Free Press, Gregg Gilmore wrote a weekly column about parenting in the South.
Her first novel, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, is rooted in summer vacations spent with her paternal grandmother and grandfather, a revival-bred preacher, who after church on Sundays, always took his granddaughters to the Dairy Queen.
Gregg Gilmore currently lives in Nashville.
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