Joanne Rendell is the author of The Professors’ Wives’ Club, Crossing Washington Square, and the forthcoming Out of the Shadows (all published by New American Library, an imprint of Penguin). She lives in New York City with her husband, a professor at NYU, and her son.

Joanne grew up in England – on Plymbridge Road, in a town called Plympton, which is near the city of Plymouth. Even as a child, she enjoyed all the Plyms in her address. Plymouth is a good five hour drive from London and a much longer journey from New York City, yet when Joanne was young she had a crush on the Big Apple (she now blames her mum’s love of American cop shows like Cagney and Lacey). When she was ten years old, in fact, she wrote a series of stories about a couple of kids who find a magic footpath in New York’s Central Park.

After leaving school, Joanne went to the University of Leeds in Yorkshire where she completed a degree in English Literature and Philosophy – and spent countless Friday nights dancing to classic 90’s hits like Pulp’s Common People and (yes, she admits it) Take That’s Relight My Fire.

The student life was too much fun for Joanne, so she went on to do a Masters at King’s College London and then a PhD in English Literature at the University of Sheffield. She still did a lot of dancing as a grad student, but she also enjoyed jetting to far-flung places to attend academic conferences.

On one such adventure to a conference being held in Saskatoon, Canada (it took 3 flights and over twenty hours traveling to get there), she met a professor from the U.S. named Brad Lewis. Over wilting hors d’oeuvres at a pre-conference mixer, they discovered they liked the same books, loved the same philosopher, Michel Foucault, and even more importantly they both had all the albums of the great Billy Bragg.

Joanne and Brad started to write papers together, organize conference panels, email furiously, and eventually they fell hopelessly in love. After Joanne was done with her PhD, she upped sticks and moved to New York to be with Brad, who teaches at NYU. Not long after they got married, and not too much longer after that, their son Benny arrived on the scene.

Over the past seven years, Joanne has juggled life as a homeschooling mum with writing novels. She hasn’t left academia completely behind. She and Brad are faculty in residence in one of NYU dorms and they run events, book groups, and programs for the students who live in their building. Also, Joanne’s novels are all set at Manhattan U – a university in downtown New York which looks, she does admit, a little like NYU.

When she’s not writing or exploring the dinosaur halls at the American Museum of Natural History, she loves to eat burritos, listen to books on her ipod, and think about Cadbury’s Chocolate Buttons which aren’t readily available in the U.S.

Joanne hasn’t found a magic footpath in Central Park yet, but she continues to search.

The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed Joanne about her move from academia to the world of fiction writing.

The New York Times featured Joanne and her family in an article about homeschooling in New York City.