Marissa Hale

Enamored of the natural world and the human experience in it, Marissa Hale has traveled to eleven countries on three continents and visited thirty-eight of the fifty United States. She learned French at a young age, studied in Paris, France at the American University there, and graduated from Wheaton College with a degree in Communications. In many ways, her life paralleled Vittorie’s journey to Kentucky and beyond: Everything she knew was suddenly stripped away, she didn’t know where to go nor how to move forward from there, and she was lost in the same region.

However, the kindness of Kentucky strangers helped Marissa along and, in the end, she lives a success story with her husband, relationships, and discovering her own path.

Marissa began researching the story of Frenchman’s Knob shortly after her own move to Hart County, Kentucky in December 2007. Fresh off the road from touring with her sisters in her band and feeling for the first time like she was terrible at everything she tried to do in her new life, she felt lost, ill-equipped, and alone. The band had broken up, her dyed-red hair seemed misplaced among her sweet Amish neighbors, and she was practically the only woman within a 50-mile radius who wasn’t married with children or a fabulous cook.

When a neighbor delivered Florence Edwards Gardiner’s little green book of her father’s (Cyrus Edwards) stories about the landscape and its people and casually said, “I’ve always thought someone should make a movie out of the second story, the one about Frenchman’s Knob…” Marissa was hooked. Because of her previous experience in France and knowledge of the language, the highest peak in Kentucky being named “Frenchman’s Knob” and the accompanying story captured her attention.

Writing about people and their stories made sense to Marissa since she had been writing three-and-a-half-minute songs for Nashville or New York to broadcast for a decade. She knew storytelling. She could research. And she did.

Before becoming a historical fiction author with American Wild, Marissa wrote songs and screenplays, performed for crowds of thousands, and taught elementary school art. In addition to writing, she now owns a general contracting company and makes her home in South Carolina with her husband, children, and grandchildren.