Mary Monroe

Mary Monroe is a historical fiction author from Alabama who has made a name for herself with the “God Don’t Like Ugly” series of novels. She is famously the daughter of Alabama sharecroppers and has the distinction of being the only and first member of her family ever to finish high school. Unlike many authors, Monroe never did go to college or attend any writing classes as everything she knows about writing is self-taught. However, she got an early start in writing as she had started writing short stories aged four and has written ever since. Her debut novel was the 1985 published “The Upper Room”, which received much critical acclaim in the United States and Great Britain. Terry McMillan incorporated an excerpt of the novel into the “Breaking Ice anthology”. Over the years, she has won several awards including the 2001 Best Fiction of the Year Oakland Pen Award for the novel “God Don’t Like Ugly”. In 2004, “Gonna Lay Down My Burdens” was the winner of the Best Southern Author Award. The ultimate feather in her cap was when she won the 2016 AAMBC Maya Angelou Lifetime Achievement Award. Mary Monroe is divorced and spends a lot of her time reading the likes of James Patterson, Alice Walker, Stephen King, and Ernest Gaines. For the most part she writes every day of the week getting most of her ideas from the people around her and current events, though most of her work is autobiographical.