Michelle Collins Anderson was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up on a farm in the Missouri Ozarks — a place and a way of life that has shaped her writing. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Missouri with a Bachelor of Journalism degree and spent the next fifteen years as a copywriter in advertising and public relations agencies in St. Louis, Palo Alto, Denver and Houston before pursuing a freelance career and teaching at the University of Missouri and Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. In 2013, she graduated with an MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. Michelle and her husband, Clay, have three adult children and live in a 1907 brick row house in St. Louis, Missouri, with two cats and a border collie. THE FLOWER SISTERS is her first novel.