L.M. Coppa grew up in Brooklyn, where a third-grade teacher let her put on plays after recess and told her, decades later on a street corner, that she had to keep writing. It took a divorce, two jobs, a daughter to raise, and a psychology degree finished the same year her daughter graduated high school—both of them in masks, during a pandemic—for her to finally listen.

She started writing And Then Ben in 2014, squeezing pages in around a full-time job, a teenage daughter, and a degree she was still working towards. She completed the first draft the day before her 40th birthday.

Her second novel, The Shady Oaks Division, won a Distinguished Favorite at the NYC Big Book Award and received a Kirkus review. She lives bicoastally between New Jersey and San Diego, where she writes about survival, identity, and women who refuse to be what anyone expects them to be.