CHRIS CANDER graduated from the Honors College at the University of Houston, where she was born and raised and still lives, with her husband, daughter, and son. For six years she has been a writer-in-residence for Writers in the Schools there, serves on the Inprint advisory board, and stewards several Little Free Libraries in her community. Her first novel, the self-published 11 Stories, won the Independent Publisher's Gold Medal for Popular Fiction, and her most recent, Whisper Hollow, was longlisted for the Southern Independent Bookseller's fiction prize. And she is also the author of The Word Burglar, which won the 2014 Moonbeam's Children's Book Award (silver).