About Kerry

NEWS: Read a great interview with Kerry on Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast!

I grew up the daughter of a football coach in football towns across the South and Midwest. I was the oldest of four children, so I spent a lot of time babysitting and making up stories for my younger brothers and sister to perform. I wrote my first novel, Offsides, about growing up in the world of football. I was also told to clean the kitchen a lot when I was a kid, and so I made up stories to escape in my head. My sister became an orphan scrubbing a stove or I became a nun, chopping vegetables—a train conductor, a sickly mother, an evil school matron— anything to escape the drudgery of my own life.

When I went to college, I decided I wanted to see the world, so I applied to be an exchange student in Manchester, England for one year. I loved England so much that it was hard for me to come back to Knoxville, Tennessee, so I pretended that my last year in college in Knoxville was another year overseas. It made me look at Tennessee very differently, and so I decided to stay and study for my Masters in Playwriting. I began to think like a writer, soaking up stories and paying close attention to the language and going to the mountains as often as possible.