MARLENE LEE holds a BA degree from Kansas Wesleyan University, an MA from the University of Kansas, and an MFA from Brooklyn College. When she's not reading, playing the piano, or talking to other writers, Marlene Lee holds down a table at a local coffeehouse in Columbia, Missouri, confronting blank pages during business hours and postponing the inevitable with another cup of coffee. Before writing full-time, she carted her stenotype machine from place to place (eventual settings for her fiction) in a moveable feast of court reporting: Brookings, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; Chico, California; San Francisco; and New York City. She now lives in Columbia, Missouri. Before her freelance court reporting career, she taught children's special education, high school English, Freshman and Sophomore college English, and vocational school classes in stenotype. Always and in-between, she was writing short stories and novels, accumulating publishable manuscripts before being actually published in 2013.