Tara Woolpy

Under various names, Tara Woolpy has been writing and publishing fiction for over thirty years. Tara earned her Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Whitworth College after which she spent a year at the Women Writers Center in Cazenovia, New York. While pursuing her writing career, she paid the rent through an astonishing number of jobs—she’s been a waitress, a shop owner, a retail clerk, a half-way house counselor and a commercial diver. Eventually, she took a midlife hiatus from writing to become an aquatic scientist. As such, she also holds a Master’s degree from Oregon State University and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Now she teaches biology online for the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and has come back to writing fiction with new passion and wonder at the long, serpentine beauty of life.

Under her own name she is the author of The Lacland series, loosely linked novels set in the fictional upper midwestern town of Lacland, including Releasing Gillian's Wolves and Raising Wild Ginger and the forthcoming Midnight Supper at the Rise and Shine, all published by Tara’s own imprint, Bats in the Boathouse Press.

In addition to the novels, her short stories and poems have appeared in Focus, Corymb, Kalliope, Alligator Juniper and the anthology The Things that Divide Us from Seal Press.

On her way to happily ever after, Tara has published under a number of last names (Woolpy, Reed, Danaan, Bentham and Reed-Andersen).