Julia Glass

American author and winner of the 2002 National Book Award for "Three Junes," her first novel, Glass is the older of two girls. A book lover as a child, she worked at the local library. She graduated summa cum laude in 1978 from Yale with a degree in art and spent a year in Paris on a painting fellowship. Returning to Massachusetts, she got a job working for a Cambridge museum on an archeological dig in Turkey. In the early 80s she followed many of her Yale friends to New York where she began to work as a freelance writer and copy editor. She married, continuing her painting, and, with her writing background, landed a full-time editor’s position at Cosmopolitan magazine. She didn’t begin to write seriously until the mid-80s. Her first marriage ended in 1991, but she remarried soon after, a marriage that produced two sons. In December 1992, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and not even two weeks later, her younger sister committed suicide. Glass had major surgery in 1993 and had a "superficial" recurrence of cancer in 2000. In 1993, she won the Nelson Algren Award for her first published story, "Collies," and she eventually sold other stories and won other awards. At the encouragement of agents, she developed "Collies" into a novel, "Three Junes." Link to Wikipedia biography