Dee Andrews grew up in a small Kansas town where her grandmothers were her first storytellers: Grandma Martha taught school in a one-room country schoolhouse, Grandma Helen moved to Los Angeles for a year and worked in a pie shop, and Great-Grandma Kelly worked as a maid after her mother died. Dee’s been chasing stories of overlooked lives and unlikely journeys ever since.
Her debut novel The Fevered World grew from interest in the 1918 influenza pandemic sparked by living in Spain during the 2009 swine flu outbreak. Learning that scientists and historians believe the Spanish Flu may have originated in Kansas further hooked her. Wanting to understand how the virus traveled from the American heartland to reshape the world, she spent years researching the era and the lives caught in its wake.
She holds a journalism degree from the University of Kansas and is a graduate of Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s The Book Project. Her short story “The Enemy Within,” which inspired The Fevered World, received an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train‘s Short Story Award for New Writers.
She is currently at work on a new novel, On The Rails, inspired by her brother and centered on a young man full of agitation and wanderlust who rides freight trains across America in the 1980s and ’90s. Though her projects span eras and settings, her fiction consistently returns to questions of belonging, independence, and what it means to find—or carry—home.
Dee and her husband met on a blind date in college and have made their home in Boulder, Colorado. When not immersed in words, she enjoys downward dogs, hiking, and time with her two daughters. A sun-kissed tomato from her parents’ garden in Kansas might be her favorite food.
Stroll along with me.
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