Kathy Leonard Czepiel is the author of A Violet Season (Simon & Schuster), named one of the best books of 2012 by Kirkus Reviews. She is the recipient of a 2012 creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her short fiction has appeared in Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, CALYX, Confrontation, Brain Child, and elsewhere. Czepiel teaches writing at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. Learn more about Kathy at her website: KathyLeonardCzepiel.com. "I've been writing since I was three years old, when I dictated stories to my mother, who wrote them in stapled booklets for me to 'illustrate.' My first published story appeared in Cricket magazine when I was 10 years old, and the local newspaper came to interview me. I was probably the only nerd in my high school who had a manual typewriter in her bedroom. On it, I wrote a 500-page novel and, with my best friend Kim, several plays which we produced with our friends. Who needed summer camp? "I graduated from Dickinson College with a BA in English and had a story published in Dickinson Review, but after that my writing became more career-oriented. I earned a master's degree from New York University in English and American literature, and I worked in public relations and journalism. In my early thirties, I became a high school English teacher. It's true that the best way to learn something is to teach it. For the first time, I stepped back to really think about how we write, not just what we write. That process was intensified when I joined the faculty of the First-Year Writing Program at Quinnipiac University in 2004. I still teach at Quinnipiac, and I continue to learn from my stellar colleagues and my many hard-working and interesting students. "My debut novel, A Violet Season (Simon & Schuster, July 2012), is the product of four summers of intensive writing. With a teaching job and two children at home, I found it difficult to write much during the school year, though I did manage to publish short fiction, at the rate of about one story per year, in Cimarron Review; Indiana Review; CALYX; Confrontation; The Pinch; Blue Mesa Review; Brain, Child and others. In 2011 I was the recipient of a creative writing grant from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, and in 2012 a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. "Today I am a writer who teaches. I spend some days at my cluttered home desk, focused on a writing project. Other days I spend in the classroom with my students. In the afternoon, I'm usually hanging out with my kids at music lessons or gymnastics or the pool. My husband cooks dinner because I'm bad news in the kitchen. I like nothing better than to end the day--how else?--inside the pages of a good book."