Meet Michelle

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, and given her a love of hard work and the outdoors.

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 as a writer, editor, and teacher. She has taught copywriting and marketing at the University of Missouri and Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, as well as creative writing for elementary-aged students.

When her third child started kindergarten, Michelle went back to school to get the degree she had always wanted — but had been too practical to pursue in her youth. She graduated with an MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina in 2013.

Michelle and her husband, Clay, have three children: Benjamin, Levi and Vivian. They live in an old Victorian house just north of the downtown square in Liberty, Missouri. When she isn’t reading, writing or enjoying her family — which includes two cats and a puppy — she loves coffee, gardening, playing Scrabble, hiking with the dog, tennis, yoga, jogging, and staring off into space.