Auburn McCanta is a national IPPY and Benjamin Franklin Award winner for Popular Fiction, and a Pacific Northwest girl gone Southward. She currently serves as an Ambassador for the National Alzheimer’s Association and donates ten percent of all author’s proceeds toward research for finding a cure or positive treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Sadly, she’s still waiting for that cure or treatment to come.
After growing up literally surrounded by her mother’s prized Portland roses, McCanta now lives in Phoenix with her husband, one huffy cat and one giant and irresistible Labradoodle. She’s become accustomed to the Sonora Desert with its occasional neighborhood coyote and scorpion rout. Wild bunnies often visit her tomato garden.
After the 1994 removal of a larger-than-golf ball brain tumor, McCanta found writing a source of therapy. Her early work appeared in Cruising World, Hobie Hot Line, California Cat and the Sacramento Bee and Arizona Republic newspapers. Much to her amusement, McCanta’s first work of full-length fiction (unpublished still) received a fourth place award from the National Writers Association. In 2007, her second novel was a Pacific Northwest Writers Association literary finalist.She was honored in 2008 with a third place award for poetry by PNWA. Now, those national IPPY and Benjamin Franklin awards are enough to take her breath away.
Prior to the 2008 presidential election, and because of her writing style, McCanta was selected from among thousands of hopefuls by Huffington Post to serve as a Citizen Journalist. She now contributes as a national Ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Association. She is currently working on a second novel, this time a mystery … written improbably from within the mind of a schizophrenic sleuth and her many “voices.” She also blogs now and then at AuburnMcCanta.com.
When not writing or undergoing yet another surgery, McCanta enjoys the tradition of her distant Irish heritage by eating potatoes.