Shelby Hearon

Shelby Hearon was born in Marion, Kentucky, lived for many years in Texas and New York, and made her home in Burlington, Vermont. She was the author of more than 15 novels, including Footprints, Life Estates, and Owning Jolene, which won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award. She received an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant as well as fellowships for fiction from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she twice won the Texas Institute of Letters Literary Award in the fiction category. Hearon died in 2016.