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Michelle Collins Anderson grew up on a farm in the Missouri Ozarks — a place and a way of life that has shaped her writing. A graduate of the University of Missouri with a MFA from Warren Wilson College, she previously worked in advertising and public relations, taught elementary school creative writing, and was an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri and Stephens College. She serves on the board of The Missouri Review and her short fiction has appeared in Nimrod International Journal, Literal Latté, Midwestern Gothic, Elder Mountain: A Journal of Ozarks Studies, Bosque, The Lascaux Review, Pooled Ink, Storied Hills: An Anthology of Contemporary Ozark Fiction, and other publications. A mother of three, she lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
Michelle Collins Anderson's website
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Tell us about yourself.
I was born in St. Louis but grew up on a registered Angus cattle farm just outside of West Plains, Missouri, where The Flower Sisters is set — although I renamed it "Possum Flats" in the novel. I went to the University of Missouri for a journalism degree and — like Daisy in The Flower Sisters — interned at my hometown paper where I wrote obituaries and photographed everything from weirdly shaped vegetables to prize heifers at the county fair. I spent a number of years writing and teaching advertising and marketing before switching my focus to creative writing. After my third child started kindergarten, I went back to school and graduated with an MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson College in 2013. My husband, Clay, and I live in Liberty, Missouri, in a 133-year-old Victorian with a border collie and two sister cats, a tortoiseshell and a calico. We have three adult children, Benjamin, Levi and Vivian.
Give us a brief description of your novel.
The Flower Sisters is based on a real event that happened in my hometown of West Plains, Missouri. In 1928, there was a huge explosion at the town dance hall on a Friday night — the reverberations of which were felt 30 miles away. ...
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