Mary Lou Anderson, who writes under the name M.L. Edson, was born in California’s Central Valley. Her family soon moved to northwestern California, where redwood trees tower over everyone and everything.
Writing a journal came naturally for her, but she didn’t realize it had planted a seed to write so much more. Many false starts and normal intrusions of life (family, health, work) kept her away from pencil and paper, manual typewriters, her first electric one, then her own IBM Selectric. The availability of computers changed everything! Certainly a book lived within the electronic wiring.
Teaching inside California’s prisons for two decades gave voice to her characters … both evil and heroic. Her works include novels The Six Rivers Killer, based on a true crime, and Sierra Heist, about people trying to survive the skittish economy. Also available are: Not Even a Shadow, a journal written while working in the prison system; Grammar Guardian, a quick punctuation/grammar guide; Doing Life with a Map, a workbook for those at-risk and co-authored with Lee Bowman; and Poems, covering all life’s aspects.