L. M. Coppa

L.M. Coppa grew up in Brooklyn, where a third-grade teacher let her put on plays after recess and told her, decades later on a street corner, that she had to keep writing. It took a divorce, two jobs, a daughter to raise, and a psychology degree finished the same year her daughter graduated high school—both of them in masks, during a pandemic—for her to finally listen.

She started writing And Then Ben in 2014, squeezing pages in around a full-time job, a teenage daughter, and a degree she was still working towards. She completed the first draft the day before her 40th birthday.

Her second novel, The Shady Oaks Division, is a multi-award winning thriller, earning recognition from the NYC Big Book Award, Literary Titan, Firebird Book Awards, and The BookFest. She lives bicoastally between New Jersey and San Diego, where she writes about survival, identity, and women who refuse to be what anyone expects them to be.