Susan Gregg Gilmore is an American author, best known for her women's fiction, historical fiction, and contemporary stories. She was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1961, and had a childhood that was heavily influenced by her parents' love of art and storytelling. While her mother, a painter, tried to encourage her to pursue painting, it was her father's love of family storytelling that truly captured Gilmore's attention.
From a young age, Gilmore knew that she wanted to write, but she was soon drawn to journalism rather than fiction. She attended the University of Virginia, where she wrote for the student paper and held an internship at the Nashville Banner. However, after graduation, her interests shifted to museum work, and she took a secretarial position with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. It was only after earning a Master's degree in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin that Gilmore was encouraged to "live life first" before pursuing her writing career.
Gilmore married in 1983 and raised three daughters, all the while continuing to write for various newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and the Chattanooga News-Free Press. She also wrote a weekly column about parenting in the South while on staff at the Free Press. Gilmore's first novel, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, is rooted in her own experiences and memories of summer vacations spent with her paternal grandmother and grandfather in Tennessee. Today, she continues to live in Nashville and draw inspiration from the rich land she calls home.