Miriam Herin was born in Miami, Florida, and grew up imagining white Christmases and a house like Jo March’s in Little Women. At age six, enthralled by the story of Bambi, she decided to become a writer. This wasn’t Walt Disney’s Bambi, but Felix Salten’s original children’s story about death in the forest, the perils of coming of age, the triumph of the spirit over fear. That was the type of story Miriam wanted to write.

When she was fourteen, her family moved to Arlington, Virginia, where she found her white Christmases. But the dream of writing was deferred. She finished college and sampled graduate school in English, signed up for the LSAT but never took it, applied to graduate school in social work, applied to a theological seminary, actually held a job as a social worker in a children’s home and ended up back in graduate school in English. Eventually, she earned a Master’s and a Ph.D. in English from the University of South Carolina. While there, she discovered a love for teaching literature and believed then that she had found her life.

She taught at Limestone College in South Carolina before moving to New York City to marry a Methodist minister. In New York, she worked as an editorial assistant for Good Housekeeping Magazine and taught English at Essex County College in Newark, New Jersey. When she and her husband moved to North Carolina, she taught at Appalachian State University and Greensboro College as a part-time Assistant Professor of English, while raising two children. She also worked briefly on the copy desk of the Winston-Salem Journal.

When the family moved to Charlotte, she decided it was time to look again at her long-deferred childhood dream. She began writing fiction, won three statewide awards for stories, published several and started a novel. She also free-lanced as a writer, editor, producer and public relations consultant, focusing on film and video. She did work for such organizations as the American Institute of Architects, the Minnesota Institute of Architects, First Union National Bank (now Wachovia), Ruddick Corporation, Bell South, the United Methodist Church in the Southeast and in Western North Carolina and the Catholic Diocese of Charlotte. Freelancing led to a variety of adventures: hauling video equipment up Israeli hills, an all-night shoot at Maggie Valley’s Ghost Town attraction, filming in the Asheville jail and the Salisbury penitentiary and assembling Indians, Mountain Men, actors, extras, horses, wagons and a goat for three television spots for the United Methodist Church that went on to win two of the advertising industry’s Addy Awards. In Charlotte, she volunteered her time to develop and coordinate a program for Southeast Asian teenagers, whose families were refugees from the Vietnam War.

Miriam presently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with her husband. Their children are adults and Miriam has recently become a grandmother. When she is not writing, she remains passionately engaged with the things of this world that she loves: her family, friends, books, movies, plays, music, travel, hiking, cooking, spirited conversation, Duke basketball and a place in Mississippi called Turkey Creek.

Absolution is her first novel and the winner of the 2007 Novello Literary award.