Karen Salyer McElmurray, who has been a landscaper, a casino employee and a landscaper, is the author of Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, described by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as “a moving meditation on loss and memory and the rendering of truth and story.” McElmurray’s debut novel, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, was winner of the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing.

Her newest novel, Motel of the Stars (from Sarabande Books) was chosen by Oxford American as one of its picks for November 2009. Her work in both fiction and nonfiction has also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the North Carolina Arts Council. Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing at Georgia College and State University, McElmurray is Creative Nonfiction Editor for Arts and Letters.