Janis Owens

Author Janis Owens was born in 1960 to an Assembly-of-God-preacher-turned-insurance-salesman, Roy Johnson, and his wife, Martha Johnson. Growing up in the money-poor and character-rich South has shaped the mind and subsequent writing of Owens who portrays a hardscrabble and lovable picture of the rural South.

Shortly graduation from high school, Owens met and married a graduate student in Gainesville, Florida by the name of Wendel Owens. In 1983, after the birth of her first daughter Owens graduated from the University of Florida English Department, under the exclusive Harry Crews and Smith Kirkpatrick writing program. At that time she set about to write her first novel, which was set in Marianna, Florida. She claims to have 'finished in due time, and sent around to NY, where it was received well enough, considering it was a first novel and I was a twenty-four year old half-wit at the time.' The story stalled and Owens was toying with it (and a sequel) when her grandmother's only sisterdied in her house in the Westend of Marianna and Owens traveled to the funeral. It was there that Owens' mother related one of her old Magnolia Hill stories, of a neighborhood child -red haired and pretty - who died next door to them on the Hill, the victim of incest and a self-induced abortion. The haunting story planted itself in her head and Owens felt compelled to give this tragic real-life ending a fictional triumph over evil and thus wrote the first draft of 'My Brother Michael'.

In the process of writing MBM, Owens realized that one of the main characters had at least as compelling a story and decided to tell the woman’s side of the story producing 'Myra Sims'. 'The Schooling of Claybird Catts' brings the story back to full circle and carries it into the next generation.

Owens next project is the 'Cracker Roadshow' explained by Owens herself:

"In the past ten years, when traveling and speaking about my books, I would occasionally self describe as a Southerner of the Cracker persuasion, to the great amusement of my audience, especially if I said it outside the South. They found the word depreciating and naïve and inevitably, someone would ask why I’d so proudly associate myself with a word that had such a loaded historic connotation. To them, it was clear that Cracker equaled: ignorant, racist, toothless and base. To me, it meant a whole different thing, and in time, re-educating my audience over the roots and true heritage of the word became an interesting side line [(www.janisowens.com)] ."

Owens currently resides in North Central Florida with her husband.