January Meeting

The Louisville Romance Writers is excited to announce that Will Lavender will be speaking to our group on January 26, 2013 from 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm! We hope to see you there!

Will Lavender is a native of Whitley City, Kentucky. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, Sharon, and his children, Jonathan and Jenna. He is a graduate of Centre College with an MFA from Bard College. His debut novel, Obedience, was a New York Times and international bestseller. His novels have been sold in 13 countries.

A former poet and short story writer, Will moved to genre fiction after finding that he loved thrillers. The field seemed ripe for different kinds of novels, novels that used some of the traits from his earlier experimental fiction and built on literary ideas about form and context. His favorite poets are John Ashberry and David Berman, and if you look closely into his novels you can see some allusions to literary figures and many acknowledgements of the literary world Will was once a part of.

Will is now the author of "puzzle thrillers," novels that are not quite mysteries and not quite thrillers but incorporate elements of both. His inspirations are diverse: he writes with the moody atmosphere of Stephen King, with the intellectual gamesmanship of Jeffery Deaver, and with the pacing of Michael Connelly. But his greatest inspiration comes from the world of mysteries, where everything hinges on that last, devastating reveal.

Will was a college professor for six years. While teaching, he began to think about ideas such as obedience and the role of the professor in the classroom. This led him to research the works and studies of the great social scientist Stanley Milgram, and this in turn led to his first novel,Obedience. Around the time he was researching Milgram, an odd criminal case was in thenews in his hometown. His time as a professor and this unusual story culminated in a novel that The Wall Street Journal called, "A mystery as ambitious as one could imagine."

Will's second novel, Dominance, has been more than two years in the making. Again the setting is a college, and again a group of students must race against the clock to solve a tangled mystery. But this time, the stakes are even higher...