Lori Ann Stephens

From her website I was born in California, raised in Garland (a sprawling suburb of Dallas) and now live in Plano, Texas. Growing up in Garland gave me a lot of fodder for the neighborhoods in my fiction. In spite of the relative freedom my mother gave me to take off on my bike for hours at a time, and despite the fact that school friends lived a short drive away, the sheer vastness of the suburb and my own shyness as a young girl made Garland both a wilderness and a city of isolation. I teach writing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. I get most of my own writing done during the summer and winter breaks.