At first, I tried to not be a writer: I went to college to become an oceanographer. As it turns out, that involves three things I am bad at: memorizing rocks and doing chemistry and math.

Signs from the writing muses were there all along, I had just ignored them. In fourth grade, while watching the Super Bowl, I covered it like a journalist and wrote a game story by hand on a legal pad. Back then, my brother and I devoured every issue of Sports Illustrated, with great writers like Peter Gammons, Paul Zimmerman, Ron Fimrite, Peter King, and Alexander Wolff. Senior year of high school, my AP English teacher introduced me to books I couldn’t put down, anything by Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

So when I nearly failed out of the University of Delaware in a scientific curriculum, I went to the Dean’s office and asked if I could switch to an English major. They said they had three choices of emphasis: business and technical writing (boring); folklore (“like Febold Feboldson?” I asked); or journalism. “That sounds like a lot of writing,” I said, “I’ll take that one.”

Five newspaper jobs later, here we are. Mandatory braggy part: In my last two stints, at the Roanoke Times and the Virginian-Pilot, I worked alongside national-level writers who could have written for any publication in the country, but chose to stay put. I watched, learned, emulated, and innovated my own style. Along the way, I earned multiple national feature writing awards for creative non-fiction style stories, won National Motorsports Writer of the Year for a story about a local car dealer who started a NASCAR team, and helped found a boutique writing conference called “Word.” My editors twice nominated my serialized stories for the Pulitzer Prize, including the series that spawned my interest in the story surrounding the 1855 yellow fever epidemic at the center of The Fever.

Despite my failed undergraduate effort to become a scientist, my paying job these days is to promote the mind-blowing scientific research in the Virginia Tech College of Science. Ironically, I’ve come to love science, and if you read The Fever, you’ll learn quite a bit about epidemics, how viruses spread, and how insects breed along the way.

In my private life, I lived in Roanoke, Virginia, enjoy daily hikes in the woods with my black lab-ish dog, Luther, and weekly visits to my favorite brewery to sip IPAs and listen to Old Time/bluegrass music. And most importantly, I’m a daughter Dad, unabashedly proud of my “girls,” Ava, Sadie, and Lilla.