Amanda Cockrell

Amanda Cockrell is a native of California, the daughter of Marian Cockrell, a novelist, and Francis M. Cockrell, a screenwriter. She grew up in Ojai, California, sixty miles from Los Angeles, a combination of resort town, bedroom town for Hollywood, and branch office for every philosophical and religious movement to arrive in California since the 20s. (Ojai, thinly disguised, appears as Ayala in her novel, Pomegranate Seed, and in her forthcoming young adult novel, The Untied Church of Dog.)

She holds a master’s degree in English and creative writing from Hollins College (now Hollins University) and is currently managing editor of that university’s literary journal, The Hollins Critic, and director of the university’s graduate program in children’s literature. She also teaches creative writing and children’s literature in Hollins' Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program.

She has taught creative writing to both high school students and adults, and at varying times she has also been a newspaper reporter and a copywriter for both an ad agency and a rock radio station. She has received fiction fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Her newest work is the forthcoming young adult novel, The Untied Church of Dog (working title). She is also the author of Pomegranate Seed, a novel about the Hollywood blacklist; The Deer Dancers and The Horse Catchers trilogies, mythological novels of the American Southwest; The Legions of the Mist, a novel of Roman Britain; and The Moonshine Blade, a comic thriller set in her current home, southwestern Virginia. As Dana Fuller Ross, she is the author of The Holts series; as Damion Hunter, of The Centurions series; and as Alica Fields of The Goddesses trilogy.

She lives with her husband, Tony Neuron, in Roanoke, Virginia.

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Her mother, Marian Cockrell, was the author of the children's story Shadow Castle now back in print in an expanded edition, with new stories not contained in the original. See "Selected Works."