Life and career
Harris was born and grew up in Tunica, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta. In her early work she wrote poems about ghosts and teenage angst. She began writing plays while attending Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Her most recent mysteries have been in the urban fantasy genre.
After publishing two stand-alone mysteries, Harris began the lighthearted Aurora Teagarden books with Real Murders, nominated as a Best Novel 1990 for the Agatha Awards. Harris wrote several books in the series before the mid-1990s, when she began branching out into other works. [4] She did not resume the series until 1999, with the exception of one short story in a Murder, She Wrote anthology titled "Murder, They Wrote".
In 1996, Harris published the first in the Shakespeare series, featuring cleaning lady detective Lily Bard, set in rural Arkansas. At the time, a New York Times interview with Harris noted that she "live[d] in small-town Arkansas". [4] The fifth book in the series, Shakespeare's Counselor, was published in fall 2001, followed by the short story "Dead Giveaway", published in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in December 2001. Harris has said she is finished with that series.
Next Harris created The Southern Vampire Mysteries series, about a telepathic waitress named Sookie Stackhouse who works in a Northern Louisiana bar. [4] The first book, Dead Until Dark, won the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Mystery in 2001. Each book follows Sookie as she tries to solve mysteries involving vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures. [4] The series has been published in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Spain, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Argentina, Poland, Serbia, Brazil, Great Britain, Ireland, Mexico, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Lithuania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Portugal, Iceland, Czech Republic, Romania, Estonia, and Israel. Harris wrote thirteen novels in the series; the last, Dead Ever After, was published in May 2013. [5] A supplemental book, After Dead, was published in October 2013. [6] The second novel, Living Dead in Dallas , won the 2003 Lord Ruthven Award for Fiction, [7] and the anthology The Complete Sookie Stackhouse Stories won the 2018 Ruthven Award for Fiction. [8]
October 2005 marked the debut of Harris's new series, entitled Harper Connelly Mysteries, with the release of Grave Sight . The series is told by a young woman named Harper Connelly, who after being struck by lightning, is able to locate dead bodies and to see their last moments through the eyes of the deceased. [9] In October 2010, it was announced Harper Connelly's series had been optioned for a television series named Grave Sight.
The year 2014 marked the debut of the Cemetery Girl series, a graphic novel series co-written with Christopher Golden and illustrated by Don Kramer. [10]
Harris is a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the American Crime Writers League, [11] as well as a member of the board of Sisters in Crime, and alternated with Joan Hess as president of the Arkansas Mystery Writers Alliance until Hess' death in 2017.
