Michele Andrea Bowen
A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Michele Andrea Bowen was educated in the St. Louis Public School System in segregated schools. Although her family did not have a lot of money, they were blessed with health, lots of love, friends, family and a wonderful church home: the Washington Metropolitan A.M.E. Zion Church, a historic institution that was established in the city during the late nineteenth century. She started telling stories when she was little, and then, at the suggestion of her mother, writing stories when she was eight or nine years old. Her first stories were generally about little black girls who lived in St. Louis. These tales were taken to another level when Bowen reached high school and started writing about black urban teen life during the 1970s. Her first audience consisted of her cousins (as she is an only child) and good friends, who read the handwritten stories and passed them down, page-by-page, mid-west assembly line style, reader-to-reader while they sat on the porch or at the lunch table at school.
Bowen attended Washington University in St. Louis and earned an undergraduate degree with honors in psychology. She has a M.S.W. in Social Work and a M. Ed. in Counseling Education from Washington University. She also holds graduate degrees in Public Health as well as United States History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. On her way to becoming a history professor, the “writing bug really hit” and she started writing what was the rough draft of her first novel, Church Folk, which was published in June 2001. Since that time, Bowen has published three more books: Second Sunday (June 2003), Holy Ghost Corner (September 2006), and Up at the College (April 2009). Her fifth book, More Church Folk, will be out in August 2010. She has finished the synopses for her next novels and is working on a teen series. She states, “Writing is a ministry for me. I love the Lord and I love writing about God and church life. It has been a tremendous blessing to reach so many people with my stories. I praise God for this. I can’t imagine writing in any other way.”
