Great authors sometimes rise from difficult childhoods, transforming hardship into creativity. Cynthia Shearer is one of those authors. When Cynthia’s parents divorced at a young age, she coped by becoming an avid reader and keeping a daily diary. She described herself as a loner who “worked at not fitting in.” It should be no surprise that she was attracted to William Faulkner, an eccentric renowned Mississippi author. Cynthia would later become the curator of Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s house museum in Oxford, Mississippi.

Cynthia Shearer was born on June 25, 1955, in Chicopee, Massachusetts. Shortly after her birth, her family moved to Alapaha, Georgia, near Tifton, where she grew up. Her mother was a high school English teacher; her father was a West Point-trained Air Force pilot. After high school, she attended college at nearby Valdosta State College (now University), graduating in 1977. Cynthia supported herself by working as a steakhouse waitress near Moody Air Force Base, an experience she later described as “some of the most valuable experience I ever got in understanding human relationships. That was the time I realized I wanted to be a writer.”

In 1980, she moved to Oxford, Mississippi, and earned an M.A. degree in English from Ole Miss.  She began to write seriously at age thirty, when she was finishing her Ph.D. After six years of working as the curator of the Faulkner home, she resigned to teach English and write. Her goal was to make a difference in the world by writing things people truly cared about reading. An ardent advocate, Cynthia supported school integration in her small, conservative hometown, as well as a vocally opposing the Vietnam War.

Her first novel, The Wonder Book of the Air (1996), a semi-autobiographical work, was published after four years in the making. It won a 1996 prize from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Cynthia’s second novel, The Celestial Jukebox (2005), was cited in the Cambridge Companion to American Literature After 1945 (2011) as an example of new “global” Southern literature. Her work extended beyond her books, and her writing appearing in many magazines and anthologies.

Her work has appeared in publications such as TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review, Oxford American, and even Ladies Home Journal, as well as anthologies including After O’Connor: Stories from Contemporary Georgia (2003) and The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing (2008).

In 2000, Cynthia was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. She was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2018. She retired from Texas Christian University’s Center for Writing as an Assistant Director and now teaches as an adjunct faculty member for the English Department at Texas Christian University. Most of her students describe her as an “awesome” teacher. She resides in Fort Worth with her husband, Dan Williams, who is a TCU professor of humanities and Director of the TCU Press.