Draft:Olivia A. Cole

Olivia A. Cole is an American writer who originates from Louisville, Kentucky. Cole is a published essayist, who focuses most of her writing surrounding the topics of womanhood, environmentalism and race.

Early Life and Education
Olivia A. Cole was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. In high school, she was selected to attend Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts' 3 week Creative Writing summer program. Cole was an undergraduate student at Columbia College Chicago, where she earned her B.A. in Cultural Studies with a minor in Poetry. Though she is a Louisville native, she lived in Chicago for 8 years and 2 years in South Florida before retuning back to Louisville. Cole had a love for writing at a young age, and wrote her first book at 8 years old. Her understanding and use of language in a way that conveys a deeper meaning stems from classroom interactions she had with her middle school teacher. These classroom interactions fostered her writing and influenced the title of her book, The Truth About White Lies.

Career
While Cole had an early start with her love of writing and reading literature, her debut novel, Panther in the Hive came along in April 2014. Following its success, its sequel, The Rooster's Garden was released in February of 2016. In January of 2018, she released the first book of her YA Sci-Fi/Fantasy series, A Conspiracy of Stars. An Anatomy of Stars was published in April of 2019 as the second book in the series. In December of 2020, Cole published another sci-fi fiction, Cloud Parliament. Time to Roar is a picture book that Cole published in September of 2020.

Personal Life
Cole and her husband share a daughter and she resides with her family in Louisville, Kentucky. In an interview she states that she became aware of her Queer identity, along with her whiteness and femaleness at age 13. In 2015, She published an essay about trauma stemming from abuse she had experienced as a 6th grader. As an essayist, her words have been published on many notable platforms such as, The Oregon Literary Review, The Comstock Review, The Huffington Post, The Daily Dot, and xoJane.

Outside of authoring books, she also has a notable social media presence that bridges storytelling with her own personal moments. In 2016, she had a viral Tweet that was a quip about clam chowder during the lead up to Hurricane Mathew, which she experienced while being a Florida resident. In 2017, she had a viral moment on X (formerly Twitter), and Reddit about her and her husband's haunted experience while house hunting, which was much like the plot of the film, Get Out.