It may be hard to believe that best-selling author Ann Hood, who has sold more than 1 million copies of her books, did not grow up with books readily available at home. Despite this, her Italian family told stories around the kitchen table as she listened, longing to hear more and perhaps to dive into the written word. She later read the encyclopedia for fun, and the latest issues of Reader’s Digest. She was hooked from those early days, but it was nothing like when she discovered Little Women in the second grade. Even though the book made her cry for days, she grew from it into a stronger version of herself.
The strength she had grew from her upbringing in West Warwick, a small town where she learned to dream beyond it and set her sights on bigger and better things. In high school, she was a Marsha Jordan Girl for the department store at Warwick Mall after school. But deep down, her imagination grew, and her hunger for the written word became the catalyst for change in her life. When she graduated, she attended the University of Rhode Island, majored in English, and discovered a selection of authors she could not get enough of: Shakespeare, Willa Cather, and F. Scott Fitzgerald among them.
She started in the air, working for TWA as a flight attendant. That began after she read a book called How to Become an Airline Stewardess in seventh grade. This fueled her passion for flight and her desire to see it up close and personal. These adventures she had on her travels, meeting a diverse group of people, helped her create stories. She wrote on airplane galleys while the passengers were asleep.
She has been in the publishing game since the eighties with her debut novel (Somewhere off the Coast of Maine, 1987). It is about the lives of three friends in the 1960s, who form an unlikely bond during the Vietnam War. Ultimately, it is about the choices we make and how we have to, in the end, live with them forever.
The choices she made are truly inspiring for mothers everywhere. She and her husband embarked on a journey to China to adopt a baby girl named Annabelle. Three years earlier, she had lost her daughter Gracey to strep throat, but used this sorrow to help others get to the other side of grief. She picked up knitting, which later resulted in a new novel (The Knitting Circle, 2007). Partly autobiographical, the novel helped her grow as a person and as a writer, putting her on the map again. It stayed on the best-selling list for ten weeks. She also wrote a memoir (Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, 2008) that highlights Gracey’s impact on her life and what Gracey meant to her. That says a lot about a woman who turned her pain into purpose.
Her purpose followed her all the days of her life, resulting in fourteen novels, four memoirs, two short story collections, a ten-book series for middle-grade readers, and one young adult novel.
Her most recent work (The Stolen Child, 2024) has people talking. Readers and critics call the book bittersweet. It is historical fiction that follows a young veteran, a young woman, and a mysterious baby. The veteran travels to France and Italy to find the baby who was in his care in World War I. It explores the human condition, relationships, and moral choices across generations.
Ann Hood is the director of the Newport MFA program in Creative Writing at Salve Regina University. She shows any ambitious person the possibilities that can come of hard work and persistence. She’s been in the publishing game since her earliest memories, and continued believing in the American dream — to take the literary world by storm.