Laura Joh Rowland

Laura Joh Rowland is the daughter of Chinese and Korean immigrants. She grew up in Michigan and was educated at the University of Michigan, where she graduated with a B.S. in Microbiology and a Masters in Public Health. She lives in New Orleans with her husband, Marty, and their three cats. My road to publication was almost as accidental as my road to becoming a writer. In 1992 I attended the New Orleans Writers Conference. Everyone who signed up and paid the registration fee got to submit an excerpt from a manuscript to be read and critiqued by one of the editors who would be speaking at the conference. My excerpt from Shinju happened to go to an executive editor at Random House. He liked it and asked to see the whole manuscript. Eventually, he bought it. That was 12 years and 10 books ago.