Samantha Mabry

Samantha Mabry grew up in Texas playing bass guitar along to vinyl records, writing fan letters to rock stars, and reading big, big books. She majored in English at Southern Methodist University, where she completed an honors project in Shakespeare's Roman plays and won an award for being the most promising Latin student of the year (there were only about ten other students of Latin, so the competition wasn't particularly stiff). In graduate school at Boston College, she shifted her focus to environmental literary criticism and wrote a lot about parks. For the past few years, Samantha has taught English, including developmental writing, composition and rhetoric, and Latino literature at the college level. In the classroom, she rarely talks about Shakespeare or parks, but she tries to throw in a Latin phrase or two whenever possible.

Samantha lives in Dallas with her husband - a historian - and her pets, including a cat named Mouse. A Fierce and Subtle Poison is her first novel.