Peggy Lampman is the award-winning, best-selling author of THE PROMISE KITCHEN (released prior as SIMMER AND SMOKE: A SOUTHERN TALE OF GRIT AND SPICE). She was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Communications, summa cum laude, from the University of Michigan. After graduating, she moved to New York City, where she worked as a copywriter and photographer for Hill and Knowlton, a public relations firm. She moved back to Ann Arbor, her college town, and opened up a specialty foods store, The Back Alley Gourmet. After selling the store, she wrote under a weekly food byline in The Ann Arbor News and MLive. One December afternoon in 2010, Ms. Lampman was visiting her ancestral graveyard in Stewartville, a backwoods, Confederate flag-waving town. As she watched a young woman and child wander down the road, Lampman wondered how a young mother could escape a town of poverty, racism and crack houses. Her imagination took flight; that evening she wrote the first page of THE PROMISE KITCHEN. Forever a Bama girl, she, her husband and kids, divide their time between Alabama, Ann Arbor and a house on the shoreline in northern Michigan. She's currently working on THE WELCOME HOME DINER, which will be published in 2017 by Lake Union Publishing. Free time is spent indulging in her barbecue addiction with Big Green Egg cult cookery.THE PROMISE KITCHEN is her debut novel.