Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1947-48
• Raised—Lynchburg, Virginia, USA
• Education—Dunbarton College; Kent State University
• Currently—lives in Lynchburg, Virginia
Leah Weiss is an American author, whose debut novel, If the Creek Don’t Rise, was published in 2017. She was born in North Carolina, not far from the tobacco farm where her mother was raised; when she was 10, her family moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Both places played a role in Weiss's development. As she told the Lynchburg News & Advance:
My mother’s simple upbringing on a farm and her ability to see "rich" where others saw "poor" influenced me. My dad’s people in Virginia were the artists, a granddad who was a violinist, my namesake Leah who designed her clothes and thought nothing of laying a brick patio by herself.
An avid Nancy Drew reader when young, and member of the debating team in high school, Weiss also studied piano, a talent which won her a scholarship to Dunbarton College in Washington, D.C. She also attended Kent State University.
Weiss married after graduation, gave birth to a son, and spent the next 20 years teaching music and penning freelance articles. In 1991 she took a job with the Virginia Episcopal School (VES) as the executive assistant to the school's headmaster.
During her 24 years at VES, Weiss worked to hone her writing, attending workshops and writing conferences in her spare time. If the Creek Don't Rise grew out of a short story she submitted to a 2011 contest — and won. Four years later, Weiss retired from VES, now with a book under her belt. It was 2015, the same year she landed a literary agent. (Adapted from The News & Advance.)
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