Gretchen Moran Laskas is an eighth-generation West Virginian, the setting for her first novel, The Midwife’s Tale. Her young adult novel The Miner’s Daughter, about the coal camps of West Virginia in the Great Depression, will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2007. Her short fiction has been published in numerous literary magazines, including Salt Hill, Pleiades and Mobius, and is included in the anthology American Girls about Town. Laskas now lives in Virginia with her husband and son. The Midwife’s Tale has won Appalachian Book of the Year, the Weatherford Award for Fiction, for outstanding contribution to Appalachia, and has been nominated for Southeastern Booksellers Book of the Year and the Virginia Library Award. It also received a Library Journal starred review and was selected as a “Must Read” by Working Mother Magazine and was a Featured Alternate Selection of the Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club.