Photo by Cameron Jordan
Raised on a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta, Ms. Dean received her B.A. in Religious Studies from Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. Following college, she moved to Washington, DC where she wrote talking points and speeches for a U.S. Senator and a U.S. Congressman. Frustrated by the odd clash between change-the-world idealism and power-loving egocentrism she found on Capitol Hill, she moved on to the corporate world, which held her captive in a claustrophobic cubicle for less than a year before she gave in to her passion for writing.
Since then, she has worked as a scuba diver, a wine-tasting wench, a waitress, and a screenwriter while toying with prose in the wee hours. As of 2009, she and her family are building Garden of Eden: the Sequel, replete with every shape, size, and color of fruit and vegetable Pachamama has thought to create.
