Annabel Thomas was born in Columbus, Ohio, and graduated from The Ohio State University. She worked as a reporter and feature writer for The Columbus Citizen, a morning newspaper. She also taught grade school and for many years helped her husband, a veterinarian, treat large and small animals. She has four children. Her parents were born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains of Southeast Ohio, and she returned there each summer so that the mountains and the people had a strong influence on her writing. "Probably because the hill country exists for me largely in their remembrances," she says, "it has turned, in my brain, into myth and symbol, the stuff of which my poems and stories are made. I believe the pull of different cultures resulted in a sort of double vision, a feeling of standing outside my own times, looking on from a distance. I feel this tension at the heart of my fiction." The Phototropic Woman, her first story collection, won the Iowa School of Letters Short Fiction Award in 1981 and was published by University of Iowa Press. A second volume of short fiction, Knucklebones, won the Willa Cather Award in 1994 and was published in 1995 by Helicon Nine Editions in Kansas City, MO. Two novels, Blood Feud (1998) and Stone Man Mountain (2002) were published by University of Tennessee Press.