Lynda Mullaly Hunt

Lynda Mullaly Hunt was born in Tennessee in 1960. She was the youngest of five children and led an active and outdoorsy lifestyle as a young person. One of her brothers died just before his fourth birthday, and throughout her childhood, Hunt wrote songs about him, which she credits as being the foundation for her later writing career. She earned two degrees in education and as a teacher found that her students were much more receptive to having their own writing edited when they also got the opportunity to edit her work. This led Hunt to begin writing stories (which she says were purposefully written horribly) to then give to her students to correct. She left teaching to have her two children and then joined a writer's group when they were young. Her debut novel, One for the Murphys, was published in 2012. She began writing what eventually would become Fish in a Tree at this time, which was initially titled Alphabet Soup and set in the 1970s.