Kelly Dwyer spent her childhood kissing up to librarians who could cut her in on highly illicit deals to get the very best, brand new science fiction and fantasy novels into her hands before they were released to the general public. The positive emotional association of all things reading and literature was easily reinforced by the Book It! national reading incentive program: the more Kelly read, the more pizza parties she got to host for her friends. Thank you Book It! for making Gen X geeks everywhere a tiny bit more popular.
Kelly’s mother is convinced that her love of writing was passed on genetically from Kelly’s grandmother Jan Cox Speas, a renowned historical romance novelist who passed away far too young, before she could continue her ground-breaking career writing beautiful fiction.
Though born and raised in Northern Virginia, Kelly considers herself a New Yorker at heart, having spent eight impressionable and wild years brewing all sorts of mischief with her husband, Patrick, in the city that never sleeps. The pair had a brief stop over in Minnesota to breathe fresh air, dig their toes into untainted green grass, obtain Kelly’s M.Ed. and start a family, before returning to the NoVA area with their son, Sean, born in the summer of 2007.
It was on one of the countless car trip camping vacations of her adolescence that Kelly’s brother read aloud sections from William Gibson’s Count Zero, sparking deep love for all things cyberpunk and science fiction. She and her brother graduated from stealing their father’s suit jackets to pretend to be the Mathnet duo from Square One, to imagining what it would be like to have a dog with a laser on it’s head as a sentry for their tree house. It should come as no surprise that Neuromancer still remains the most read book in Kelly’s house.
In the months (years) of chronic sleep-deprivation that followed the birth of her son, Kelly bemoaned the general loss of her higher cognitive powers. She started writing with the express purpose of regaining the ability to think about things other than diaper changes, play dates and nap times. Working on her first novel was such a satisfying and engrossing activity that she branched out into short fiction in order to experience the validation and enjoyment of actually finishing, submitting and publishing her work.
When not trying to ignore the historical background of Ring Around the Rosey while playing with Sean, Kelly squeezes in time to write in several genres of speculative fiction, including science fiction, cyberpunk, dystopian fiction and slipstream.