Shelley Cooper

SHELLEY COOPER first experienced the power of words when she was in the eighth grade and wrote a paragraph about the circus for a class assignment. Her teacher returned it with an A and seven pluses scrawled across the top of the paper, along with a note thanking her for rekindling so vividly some cherished childhood memories. Since Shelley had never been to the circus, and had relied solely on her imagination to compose the paragraph, the teacher’s remarks were a revelation. Since then, Shelley has relied on her imagination to help her sell dozens of short stories and to write her first novel, Major Dad, a 1997 Romance Writers of America Golden Heart finalist in Best Long Contemporary. She hopes her books will be as moving to her readers as her circus paragraph was to that long-ago English teacher.