MONA SIMPSON (Author) wrote the novel Anywhere But Here, on which the film is based. Since then she has written two acclaimed novels, The Lost Father and A Regular Guy. Simpson's short stories have been published in The Paris Review, Harpers, Granta, Ploughshares and The Iowa Review, and anthologized in The Best American Short Stores, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses and Best New American Fiction (edited by Tobias Wolff).

Simpson is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Prize, the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton and the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Award, 1996-1999. Last year, she was selected by Granta as one of twenty best American writers under forty. Her work has been translated in fourteen languages.

Currently, Simpson holds the Sadie Samuelson Levy Chair of Languages and Literature at Bard College. Nine of her students have sold their first novels.