April Smith
1974
April Smith is an American author, producer, and television writer best known for the historical fiction thrillers, the Ana Grey series. Smith was born in the Bronx, New York and went to the Bronx High School of Science, graduating in 1967. She later earned a bachelor of science degree from Boston University as an English major. Not one to be satisfied with an undergraduate degree, she went to Stanford University, from where she graduated with a Master’s Degree in Creative writing. Despite all her study and qualifications, the first novel she wrote while she was back in Cambridge was a total failure. She decided to try the 9 to 5 and got a job writing ad copy for a Los Angeles company, before she graduated to writing and producing for TV in 1976. She still had the desire to be a writer but it was not until the 1988 writer’s strike that she started writing her first successful novel, North of Montana. She is a well-travelled writer that has been to nearly every location in her novels from the Meuse-Argonne in France, Siena in Italy, to the Dominican Republic. During her travels, she wanders, talks to people and takes pictures that she then incorporates into her novels. While she does not specifically travel to research the novels given that most of these are family vacations, the big picture she gets sets the tone for her writing in later years. She lives in Santa Monica California with her fabulous family of two children and a husband of 34 years. When she is not writing her novels or traveling, she loves yakking with her girlfriends, hiking, writing, swimming, playing with pet pooches, cooking chocolate chip cookies, and watching a British TV series while sipping on a grapefruit Martini.