Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She attended Mount Holyoke College and received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is the author of a study of early American motherhood, We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750 1835, and a novel, The Story of Land and Sea. She lives in New Orleans.