Chris Cander graduated from the Honors College at the University of Houston, in the city where she was raised and still lives, with her husband, daughter, and son. For seven years she has been a writer-in-residence for Writers in the Schools there. She serves on the Inprint advisory board and stewards several Little Free Libraries in her community. Her first novel,11 Stories, won the Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Popular Fiction, and her novel Whisper Hollow was long-listed for the Great Santini Fiction Prize by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. She is also the author of The Word Burglar, which won the 2014 Moonbeam Children’s Book Award (silver).Cander's new novel is The Weight of a Piano.
From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: How was the novel's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?Visit Chris Cander's website.
A: In this case, the word is a double entendre. There's the psychic, emotional weight of the piano in the characters' lives, which grows heavier and heavier for different reasons, and the actual physical weight, which makes it not only a symbolic burden but a real one. (By the way, this particular Blüthner weighs 560 lbs. That's a lot of piano to drag through a desert--and...[read on]
My Book, The Movie: The Weight of a Piano.
--Marshal Zeringue