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Mary
Jo Putney was born in Upstate New York with a reading addiction, a
condition for which there is no known cure.
After earning degrees in English Literature and Industrial Design
at Syracuse University, she did various forms of design work in California
and England before inertia took over in Baltimore, Maryland, where she has
lived very comfortably ever since.
While
becoming a novelist was her ultimate fantasy, it never occurred to her
that writing was an achievable goal until she acquired a computer for
other purposes. When the
realization hit that a computer was the ultimate writing tool, she charged
merrily into her first book with an ignorance that illustrates the adage
that fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Since
fortune sometimes favors the foolish, her first book sold quickly, thereby
changing her life forever, in most ways for the better.
(“But why didn't anyone tell me that writing would change the way
one reads?”) Like a lemming
over a cliff, she gave up her freelance graphic design business to become
a full-time writer as soon as possible.
Since 1987, Ms. Putney has published twenty-five books and counting.
Her stories are noted for psychological depth and unusual subject
matter such as alcoholism, death and dying, and domestic abuse.
She has made all of the national bestseller lists including the New
York Times, Wall Street Journal,
and Publishers Weekly.
Four of her books have been named among the year’s top five
romances by The Library Journal.
She
has also won numerous awards, including Ritas for Dancing on the Wind and The
Rake and the Reformer, two Romantic
Times Career Achievement Awards, and four NJRW Golden Leaf awards,
plus the NJRW career achievement award for historical romance. August 2001 saw the paperback reprint of The China Bride, with Silk and Secrets, second book in the
Silk trilogy and set in a newly timely Central Asia, coming out in
November. Her second
contemporary, The Spiral Path, will be out in January 2002, and The
Bartered Bride, last in her historical Bride trilogy, will be released
in hardcover in May 2002.
Ms.
Putney says that not least among the blessings of a full-time writing
career is that one almost never has to wear pantyhose.
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