Mandi M. Lynch was born and raised in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the Midwest, the smell of dead fish wafting from Lake Erie and the sound of trains punctuating her memories. She started writing at the age of six, pecking out the words with one hand on her mother's manual typewriter. While the crayon illustrations have improved marginally (and she can now use markers without her mother getting mad), the spelling has not. As a pre-teen, she won a county-wide short story contest, despite the old cliche that it was all a dream, when she wrote about winning the lottery, shopping Mall of America, and meeting Tom Sellek on the plane. She won the President's Award for Literary Excellence in high school for her poetry. It wasn't until after high school and college creative writing classes - and a break of a couple years - that she got serious about writing as anything more than a hobby.In her twenties, Lynch started organizing writing groups, including Nashville chapters of NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy for the Office of Letters and Light and the Nashville Writers Meetup, and honing her own writing skills. She credits incredible failures such as "Thoughts While Watching Ducks" (which nobody will ever read) for making her a better writer, and she took what she learned into her first bits of commercial success. It was some of those incredible failures that led to the creation of her own literary magazine, Ink Monkey Mag, in 2009. After expanding Ink Monkey into a small press, she is now responsible for the lit mag, several anthologies, and a series of zines and chapbooks. During this time, her own writing success truly began and she found herself featured in several anthologies for a variety of presses including Pill Hill and Kerlak. When not working her day job (which actually occurs at night), she spends the majority of her time at some writing related task. Still very successful at adult fiction, her works in progress include pieces for all ages and in varying lengths. She lives outside Nashville, TN, with three cats, none of which write due to lack of thumbs.