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2004 Season
 A lifelong Southerner, author Lynn York was born and raised in North Carolina. Many of the characters in her fiction are inspired by the interesting and compelling people she met growing up in Pilot Mountain, NC and elsewhere.
York earned an undergraduate degree in English and French from Duke University. Before returning to school for a Masters in Business and Communications Policy from the University of Texas at Austin, she spent two years driving all over Texas and Oklahoma as a sales representative for Prentice Hall textbooks. Later, armed with her graduate degree, she worked her way up the ranks of a telecommunications start-up, NetExpress, Inc., in Washington, DC to become head of marketing for the company.
Eventually, small children and the promise of decent vegetables and a yard with grass lured York (and her husband) back to North Carolina in 1995. Working as the managing partner of her husband’s architecture firm and raising her two children, York found herself longing for something that would belong to her alone. She found it in writing.
According to York, writing was her “lifeboat, the one thing – amid kids and housework and career and a waning marriage – that was mine and mine alone.” She relied on weekend writer’s retreats, writing workshops, and the support of an incredible writer’s group to create the novel that would become The Piano Teacher (Plume, March 2004). Beginning in a graduate writing workshop, eminent Southern-writer Lee Smith offered her an incredible amount of encouragement, inspiring her to complete the first full draft of her novel. After countless rejections, York found an agent in Suzanne Gluck, William Morris Agency, at the Aspen Writer’s Foundation Summer Words Program in June 2002.
Currently divorced, York now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with her two children, Anna Lee and Will. She runs a part-time consulting business and is very happy – in the middle of her life – to be a first-time novelist.
The Piano Teacher (2004)
Excerpt
from The Piano Teacher, by Lynn York:
The whole thing got off to a bad start when Miss Wilma unceremoniously ran over a squirrel in the Strongs' driveway, right in front of the porch. She had been going over her prelude program, the standard wedding fare, Handel, Bach, a little Vivaldi, and she didn't see the squirrel at all, just felt a sudden small bump under her tire. When she walked up to the house, she confirmed it. There he lay flat, his little squirrel blood running across the driveway.
Continued...
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