BEFORE WOMEN HAD WINGS (BALLANTI

Connie May Fowler grew up in St. Augustine, Florida, until her father died when she was only seven years old, leaving Connie, her sister Deidre, and their mother Lee in near poverty.  They moved to Tampa, and as her mother struggled to make ends meet as a motel bookkeeper and maid, Connie sought refuge in books: "I could be transported from the awful circumstances of my life by simply opening a book.  And writing went hand in hand with reading.  Writing to me was a kind of salvation."            While Connie attended the University of Tampa on a full scholarship, her mother, who had never really gotten over the loss of her husband, started drinking heavily and eventually died of cirrhosis.  Connie, feeling lost, quit school and spent two years traveling through the United States and Mexico.  She returned to Florida, where the provost of the University of Tampa spotted her working as a waitress and persuaded her to return to the university where she earned a B.A. in English.              Connie married Mika Fowler in 1987 and moved to Kansas, where she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Kansas.  A professor there encouraged her to take a class in fiction writing.  "That suggestion turned everything around for me.  The fiction professor treated me for the first time in my life as if I was truly a writer.  With her, everything coalesced.  Fiction suddenly made sense to me."   Sugar Cage , Connie's critically acclaimed debut novel, began as a short story written to fulfill a writing assignment for a fiction workshop.  It evolved into her graduate thesis and eventually into a novel.  Critical praise continued with her next two novels, River of Hidden Dreams and Before Women Had Wings .

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