Lalita Tademy was born in Berkeley, California, far from her parents' Southern roots. A former vice president of Sun Microsystems, she left the corporate world to immerse herself in tracing her family's history and writing her first book, Cane River, based on the lives of four generations of colored Creole slave women in Louisiana, women Tademy descended from. She is also the author of Red River, a historical novel based on real events during Reconstruction after the Civil War.
