We are pleased to announce our Keynote for the
2013 Fun in the Sun Conference
Charlaine Harris a New York Times bestselling author who has been
writing for thirty years. She was born and raised in the Mississippi River
Delta area. Though her early works consisted largely of poems about ghosts and
teenage angst, she began writing plays when she attended Rhodes College in
Memphis, Tennessee. She switched to novels a few years later, and achieved
publication in 1981 with Sweet and Deadly.
After publishing two stand-alone
mysteries, Harris launched the lighthearted Aurora Teagarden books with Real
Murders, a Best Novel 1990 nomination for the Agatha Awards. Harris wrote
eight books in her series about a Georgia librarian. In 1996, she released the
first in the much darker Shakespeare mysteries, featuring the amateur
sleuth Lily Bard, a karate student who makes her living cleaning houses. Shakespeare's
Counselor, the fifth—and last-- was printed in fall 2001.
After Shakespeare, Harris
created The Sookie Stackhouse urban fantasy series about a
telepathic waitress named Sookie Stackhouse who works in a bar in the fictional
Northern Louisiana town of Bon Temps. The first book in the series, Dead
Until Dark, won the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Mystery in 2001. Each
book follows Sookie through her adventures involving vampires, werewolves, and
other supernatural creatures. The series, which now numbers eleven titles, has
been released worldwide.
Sookie Stackhouse has proven to be
so popular that Alan Ball, creator of the HBO television series Six Feet
Under, announced he would undertake the production of a new HBO series based
upon the books He wrote and directed the pilot episode for that
series, True Blood, which premiered in September of 2008 . It was an
instant success and is now filming its fourth season.
In October 2005, the first of
Harris’s new mystery series about a young woman named Harper Connelly debuted
with the release of Grave Sight. Harper has the ability to determine the
cause of death of any body. After four novels, this series is on hiatus.
Harris has also co-edited four very
popular anthologies with her friend Toni L.P. Kelner. The anthologies feature
stories with an element of the supernatural, and the submissions come from a
rare mixture of mystery and urban fantasy writers.
Professionally, Harris is a member
of the Mystery Writers of America, the American Crime Writers League, Sisters
in Crime, and the International Crime Writers Association. She is a past member
of the boards of Sisters in Crime and MWA. She is also a member of Science
Fiction Writers of America, Horror Writers Association, and Romance Writers of
America, just to make sure she’s covered.
Personally, Harris is married and
the mother of three. She lives in a small town in Texas and when she is not
writing her own books, she reads omnivorously. Her house is full of rescue
dogs.
® 2011
Charlaine Harris
Photo taken by C. Radish
Photo taken by C. Radish