Lyda Phillips was born in San Antonio, Texas, went to school in Memphis, Tenn., and has degrees from Northwestern, Columbia and Vanderbilt universities. She has worked as a journalist for trade papers, weeklies, dailies and United Press International. She has also worked for political campaigns, as a political pollster and public relations executive, analyst and freelance writer. She is a reviewer and essayist for Chapter 16, a website sponsored by the Tennessee Humanities Council, a member of SCBWI and studied fiction writing at Northwestern University, The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Md., and Watkins Institute of Art and Film in Nashville, Tenn. She is a member of Nashville's Porch Writers Collective and an author host at the Southern Festival of Books. Her two YA novels won national awards in 2006 and have been featured at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.