In the first draft of your author bio, you must include everything you’ve ever written: the article that ran in your middle school newspaper about Earth Day, the poem your mom pasted at the end of her Christmas letter in 1998. You’re pretty sure you read somewhere that you can copyright your work just by putting it in the mail, and what is “publishing” if not copyrighting your work and asking others (your mom’s cousin in Tennessee, your great-aunt in Alabama) to read it?
In your second draft, erase everything you added earlier. Erase even your name. Spend a week, a month, longer, debating some kind of nom de plume you think might lend you gravitas. Start over again. Keep it simple this time. List only the degrees, the awards, the publications so well known that great-aunt in Alabama would recognize their names. Finally, decide to approach your bio like you are at dinner with Nora Ephron and you’re playing her favorite restaurant game. Nora has asked you to write down the five words that define you: writer, mother, sister, daughter, wife. Panic before you hit Send and add that you live near the beach.
Samantha Browning Shea is an author and the vice president of Georges Borchardt, Inc. literary agency. A graduate of Colgate University, she lives in Connecticut with her husband and their two daughters. Marrow (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2025) is her debut novel.
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