Tawni O'Dell Biography

Tawni O'Dell is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Sister Mine, Coal Run, Fragile Beasts, and Back Roads, which was an Oprah's Book Club pick and a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection. Back Roads has been made into a movie in 2014, staring Andrew Garfield and Jennifer Garner. She is also a contributor to the anthology, Becoming Myself: Reflections on Growing Up Female.

Born and raised in Indiana (also the hometown of Jimmy Stewart) in the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania ("a beautiful ruined place where the rolling hills are pitted with dead gray mining towns like cigarette burns on a green carpet") O'Dell has been writing fiction since she read Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach when she was six years old. By the time she was eight she had a stack of her own short stories. When she was ten she read To Kill a Mockingbird four times in a row which was the catalyst for her lifelong love of southern writers such as Truman Capote, William Styron, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.

She spent thirteen years in the Chicago area before moving back to Pennsylvania where she now lives with her two children her husband, literary translator Bernard Cohen.

Tawni O'Dell's website

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