Author Bio
• Aka—Anne Frasier
• Birth—ca. 1950s
• Where—Burlington, Iowa, USA
• Education—Artesia High School, Artesia, New Mexico
• Awards—Romantic Times Best Romantic-Adventure
Writer Award; Romance Writers of America Award
(RITA); Daphne du Maurier Award; Romantic Times
Career Achievement Award.
• Currently—lives in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota
Theresa Weir is the real name of Anne Frasier, a USA Today bestselling author of nineteen novels that have spanned the genres of suspense, mystery, thriller, romantic suspense, paranormal, and memoir. Her books have been translated into twenty languages.
Weir’s debut title was the cult phenomenon Amazon Lily, initially published by Pocket Books and later reissued by Bantam Books. Writing as Theresa Weir, she won a RITA for romantic suspense (Cool Shade), and a year later the Daphne du Maurier for paranormal romance (Bad Karma).
In her more recent Anne Frasier career, her thriller and suspense titles hit the USA Today list (Hush, Sleep Tight, Play Dead) and were featured in Mystery Guild, Literary Guild, and Book of the Month Club. Hush was both a RITA and Daphne du Maurier finalist. Well-known and respected in the mystery community, she served as hardcover judge for the Thriller presented by International Thriller Writers, and was guest of honor at the Diversicon 16 mystery/science fiction conference held in Minneapolis in 2008. Frasier books have received high praise from print publications and online review sites. Her short stories and poetry can be found in Discount Noir, Once Upon a Crime, and The Lineup, Poems on Crime. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, and Crimespace.
Life
Theresa Weir was born in Burlington, Iowa, a river town settled by German, Irish, and Dutch immigrants. Her blue-collar parents divorced when she was six, and the next twelve years were spent in poverty, moving to and from Florida, Iowa, California, Illinois, and New Mexico. She graduated from Artesia High School, Artesia, New Mexico.
After high school she worked as a waitress, a factory worker at Albuquerque’s Levi Strauss (where she sewed the Levi’s logo on the back pocket of jeans), followed by a secretarial position at Wally's LP Gas in Santa Fe, New Mexico. At age nineteen, she joined her uncle at his bar in rural Illinois across the Mississippi River from her birthplace of Burlington, Iowa. While tending bar at the Pilot House, she met an apple farmer and the two married three months later.
Shortly after moving to the farm, in the mid-1980s, Weir began writing. Her first manuscript, Amazon Lily (under Theresa Weir) was rejected by multiple agents and publishers because they believed that her hero was unlikable. Four years later, in 1988, she was offered a contract with Pocket Books—and her ground breaking, multi-award winning Amazon Lily was published.
The novel finally sold and went on to win the Romantic Times Best Romantic Adventure Writer Award, but Frasier continued to encounter editors who disliked her characters. In Frasier's words, her characters are "imperfect people who had problems, who didn't always make the right choices, but in the end triumphed." The characters have real, interesting problems, including a hero with agoraphobia and a heroine with an eating disorder.
Her work has continued to be popular with readers and fellow romance writers, however, and in 1999 she was awarded a Romance Writers of America RITA Award for Best Romantic Suspense for her novel Cool Shade. She has also been awarded the Daphne du Maurier award for romantic suspense, and she has been awarded Romantic Times Career Achievement Award and been nominated for a Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice Award for Long Night Moon.
During her years of writing romance novels, Frasier's editors often asked her "to remove the blood and bodies" from her plots. She decided that instead it would be easier for her to remove the romance and focus more completely on the mystery of the story. After several years, she found a publisher willing to allow her to move her writing into this new direction. Although she has now stopped releasing new romance novels, her thrillers do contain elements of romance. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)