Cynthia Shearer was born in Massachusetts on June 25, 1955. She lived there for the first nineteen days of her life, then moved Georgia.  Shearer has describes herself as a loner who “worked at not fitting in.”  She loved to write even as a child, but music played an equally important role in her life.  For Shearer, music and writing work hand in hand–each art influencing the other.  In high school, Shearer was an activist who deeply opposed the Vietnam War.

In 1980, Shearer moved to Oxford, Mississippi and worked toward a PhD in English at the University of Mississippi.  At this time, she began writing more than ever. She was driven by a desire to write about things that mattered to people–mattered to her.  In 1987, she and her husband Dan Williams, chairman of the English department at Ole Miss, had a daughter.

In 1994, Cynthia Shearer accepted the position of curator of Rowan Oak, the home of William Faulkner.  Later, she gave up this position in order to devote more time to her writing.  Her first novel, The Wonder Book of the Air, was published in 1996 after four years in the making.  The novel won the 1996 prize for fiction from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. The Celestial Jukebox is her second novel.

Shearer now resides in Houston Texas with her husband and daughter.

• Read our book review of
  The Celestial Jukebox.

• Browse Cynthia Shearer books at Amazon.com