Kerry Madden

BIO

Kerry Madden-Lunsford is the author of the new children’s novel, Werewolf Hamlet, a Starred Booklist Review and a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, published by Charlesbridge-Moves in 2025. Werewolf Hamlet went into a second printing and is now available as an audiobook and as a forthcoming paperback in 2026. Kerry’s picture book, Ernestine’s Milky Way, was the Alabama State Book of 2019. She also wrote the Maggie Valley Trilogy, which includes Gentle’s Holler, Louisiana’s Song, and Jessie’s Mountain. Gentle’s Holler received a Starred Kirkus and PW Review and was the State Book of North Carolina in 2007. Her biography, Up Close Harper Lee, was one of Booklist's Ten Top Biographies for Youth in 2009. Her first novel, Offsides, was a New York Public Library Pick for the Teen Age in 1997 and was optioned for a series by Diane Keaton and Jim Henson Productions. Her plays have been produced in Los Angeles and Tennessee, and she has published fiction in Shenandoah, Amaryllis, Belle Lettres, Carve Magazine, Scholastic Storyworks, and nonfiction in the North Carolina Literary Review, Global South, LA Weekly, Nelle, American Girl, and the Washington Post, among others. She has been a regular contributor to the LA Times OpEd page. For several years, she directed the creative writing program at UAB, where she is still a professor, and she taught at Antioch University’s MFA program in Los Angeles for a decade. Her children’s novel, Millie G and Vulcan, is currently under submission, and she is at work on a memoir, The Family Plan – Unstable Connections. An excerpt of her memoir received the "Three Sisters Prize" in Nonfiction from Nelle. Kerry is the mother of three adult children, a grandmother, and she now lives full-time in Birmingham, Alabama, with her husband, Kiffen, and beloved dachshunds, Olive and Wilbur.