J. A. Barker

I grew up dividing my time between Louisville, Kentucky and the little coal mining town of Keystone, West Virginia. A graduate of Tulane University with a major in philosophy, I spent twenty years in academia, as a graduate student, a faculty wife, and as Director of Foundation Relations, first at Washington University in St. Louis and then at Yale. Throughout my life I have had a passion for music, the visual arts, and literature.

I have long been interested in the vibrations of a person's moral compass, the wobble that makes us human. I strive to be a storyteller who creates situations that test our humanity and convictions, examines our choices and the debris left in life's wake. I am ultimately interested in a lived life's calculus: what is wasted, what is spent, what is left, what is retrievable, what is hoped, what is believed, what is valued, what is loved. I am an incurable romantic; I love a good love story, and you can depend on there always being one in my novels.

I now live in Greenville, South Carolina, where you can usually find me in my studio painting or sitting in my walled garden working on my next novel.