About the Author

JESS MONTGOMERY is the author of the Kinship Historical Mystery series, inspired by a true-life 1920s female sheriff in Appalachia. You can find out more about her books at www.jessmontgomeryauthor.com, or on Facebook @JessMontgomeryAuthor.Under Jess's given name, she is a columnist for Writer's Digest, "Level Up Your Writing (Life) ," and for the Dayton Daily News, focusing on the literary life, authors and events of her native Dayton, Ohio.Her first novel in the Kinship Historical Mystery series, THE WIDOWS, won the Readers' Choice in Fiction for the 2019 Ohioana Awards. Jess is a three-time recipient of the Individual Excellence Award in Literary Arts from the Ohio Arts Council, and has been a John E. Nance Writer in Residence at Thurber House (Columbus, Ohio) .She lives in her native Ohio, and in addition to writing, loves spending time with family and friends, reading, crocheting, baking (especially pies) , spoiling her cats and houseplants, hiking and occasionally fishing. If you're looking to get to know me a bit better, come and sit a spell. Get comfortable. I'll take a moment while you do, and pretend we're sitting on my back porch in my glider, with tall glasses of sweet tea.Now, the first tidbit you'll need to know about me is that I come from a long line of story-tellers, mostly unofficial, though I had one great-uncle who became a well-published poet, with several collections, and a great-aunt who wrote a gossip column for the weekly newspaper in her small Appalachian town. But mainly, I picked up story-telling from ballads that I learned from my Mamaw (my maternal grandmother) and from the shaggy-dog type stories I heard from various kin. I think my early love of language also came from the lonesome strains of those ballads and the haunting refrains of old-time hymns.It may also well be that story-telling is just in my blood. My childhood was, to put it nicely, fraught, and I found refuge in reading anything and everything I could. My dad (a WWII vet who had Purple Heart plates on both of his convertibles - there's a hint about where I get my feisty spirit!) always loved to tell the tale of how, when I was a kid, he'd put boxes of books I'd checked out from the library in the passenger seat of his pick up truck, stopping off to return them on his way downtown to his machine shop in the industrial side of Dayton, Ohio.As a kid, I read all of the time. I loved Louisa May Alcott. Jules Verne. Charles Dickens. John Steinbeck. Madeline L'Engle. Fairy tales. Mystery novels. Anything vaguely Arthurian. For a while, in junior high, all I read was Harriet The Spy, at least 13 or more times in a row. I wanted to BE Harriet in junior high... and even in high school. And some days, even now!But even before reading became a permanent passion, I was making up stories and putting them on paper. My first was "The Fireman," who rescued a kitten from the top of a tree

Read Next Recommendation