Kerry Madden-Lunsford is a regular contributor to the LA Times OpEd page. For several years, she directed the creative writing program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she is still a professor, and she taught in Antioch University’s MFA program in Los Angeles for a decade. She is the author of the picture book Ernestine’s Milky Way. She also wrote the Maggie Valley Trilogy, which includes Gentle’s Holler, Louisiana’s Song, and Jessie’s Mountain. Her first novel, Offsides, was a New York Public Library Pick for the Teen Age. Kerry is the mother of three adult children, and she now lives full-time in Birmingham, Alabama.