Tessa Smith McGovern is an award-winning short story writer whose many publication credits include the Connecticut Review and the English Arts Council at the Southbank Centre, London.
As a child growing up in Surrey, England, she loved to read. Her favorite book was a large, gloriously illustrated copy of The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights in which Scheherazade saved her own life, night after night, by telling stories. Tessa’s mother was also an avid reader, and would read beautiful sentences aloud with relish. At the age of ten, during Tessa’s parents’ acrimonious divorce, she began to keep a journal and, at eleven, was sent to board at an all-girls Church of England convent school. At sixteen, she left school, worked an assortment of jobs, then set off on her own across Europe, working first in Austria and later in Spain.
She is the founder and editor of eChook Digital Publishing, publisher of short story and memoir collections on multiple platforms: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, GooglePlay, Nook, and Kindle, as well as original Web-based stories at echook.com. eChook.com has been visited by thousands of readers in over one hundred countries.
In 2012, eChook Digital Publishing’s Memoir, Vol. 1, won a silver medal in the eLit Awards and Tessa Smith McGovern’s London Road: Linked Stories won a gold medal in the eLit Awards.
Tessa is host and executive producer of BookGirlTV, an award-winning web series for readers, writers, and book clubs featuring book reviews, interviews, and cocktail fun with emerging and bestselling authors. Recent guests include bestselling author Jane Green, memoirist Dani Shapiro, and feminist and crime author Linda Fairstein.
Tessa lives in Connecticut with her husband, has two children, aged seventeen and twenty-one, and teaches at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York.