Shelby Hearon was born in 1931 in Marion, Kentucky, lived for many years in Texas and New York, and now makes her home in Burlington, Vermont. She is the author of fifteen novels, includingFootprints,Life Estates, andOwning Jolene, which won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award. She has received an Ingram Merrill grant as well as fellowships for fiction from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she has twice won the Texas Institute of Letters fiction award. She has served on the literature panels of both the Texas Commission on the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. Married to physiologist William Halpern, she is… the mother of a grown daughter and son.