Tonya Plank

After spending many years working as an attorney in New York and Los Angeles, Tonya now resides with a small menagerie of pets in Southern Arizona, where she grew up. While working as a criminal appeals lawyer, Tonya developed a passion for ballroom dancing, which rekindled her childhood love of ballet. For several years, she wrote a dance blog, Swan Lake Samba Girl, journaling her experiences learning to ballroom dance and reviewing ballet performances in NYC. The blog was lauded by James Wolcott in his Vanity Fair blog, and Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal, among others. Tonya's first novel, Swallow, an edgy chick-lit comedy about a lawyer with the psychosomatic disorder, Globus Hystericus, won gold medals in the Independent Publisher and Living Now Book Awards and was a finalist in the ForeWord Book of the Year and National Indie Excellence Awards. When not writing, Tonya loves taking road trips with her rescue dog, Sofia, devouring Mexican food and Cadillac margaritas, curling up with her cats and a good novel, and watching dance performances of all kinds. Her favorite places on earth are Lincoln Center in New York, the Pacific Coast Highway from Laguna Beach to San Francisco, and Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, Utah.