New York Times best-selling author Carrie Ryan ’00 seems an unlikey chronicler of the dead. A debutante from Greenville, S.C., she swore off horror movies as a child after being traumatized by Poltergeist.
A lawyer by day, Ryan had been working on a “chick-lit” novel in her spare time when she read a story about the overfishing of tuna. Suddenly she had an idea for a story about a world nearly destroyed by a zombie plague. She pulled out her BlackBerry and emailed herself a single sentence—”My mother used to tell me about the ocean”—which became the first line of her critically acclaimed debut novel, The Forest of Hands and Teeth.
Ryan has since published two more books in her zombie series, 2010’s The Dead-Tossed Waves and this year’s The Dark and Hollow Places (whose ad campaign is “Eat. Prey. Love.”). In February she joined author Jay McInerney ’76 and literary editor Gary Fisketjon ’76 in Williamstown for a panel discussion on the writing life. (Read about the event in The Williams Record.)
Read more about Carrie Ryan in the March 2011 Williams Alumni Review. (For the text-only version, click here.)
You can also visit her website to read excerpts of her books and follow her national tour for The Dark and Hollow Places.