Tonya D. Price
A Fiction and Non-Fiction Writer.
AboutMe
Tonya D. Price, Author
Short Stories, Novels, Non-fiction
My mother loved to tell the story that when I was two years old I handed her a sheet of paper and a pencil and said, "I'm going to tell you a story and I need you to write it down." I have been telling and writing stories ever since. While I was growing up my parents and I had a deal I could write all night on Friday and Saturday as long as I was up and dressed for church on Sunday. My first love was short stories. As a kid, in addition to novels, I read every short story anthology I could find. I sold my first short story in 2000 and have sold over thirty (and counting) short stories since.
One of the short stories I didn't sell was "Children of Crystal City." The editor told me, "I almost bought the story, but I knew this needed to be a novel. Write that novel!" So, I did. The result is an 80,000 word YA historical novel, Internment, which explores the devastating impact of imprisonment within the walls of the WWII Crystal City family internment camp on three first-generation American teenagers, a German-American, a Japanese American, and a South American German-Jewish boy.
My husband and I live in Massachusetts with our COVID rescue cat who lets us know daily we are extremely lucky she agreed to live with us.
Look for Tonya at New England Crime Bake every November!
Lubec, Germany Town Hall
The house in Grossburgwedel, Germany where I spent a year as a foreign exchange student. (45 years later!)
Everything in a writer's life contributes to their art. So here are my influences!
I grew up in Fairborn, Ohio, a mile from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. I spent a lot of time with relatives in the Appalachian part of Ohio as my parents grew up in Franklin Furnace and East Liverpool, Ohio. When I was sixteen, I lived in Grossburgwedel, West Germany with a family for a year during the cold war.
After graduating from Oberlin College with a B.A. in Government,and minors in Educaiton and Astro Geology, I worked at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland with the Smallpox Eradication team. Three years later I entered Cornell's Johnson School of Business and completed my MBA in Marketing and Finance at Cornell’s Johnson School of Business.
I speak English, fluent German, a bit of Spanish, a bit of Swiss French and am learning Scots Gaelic.
My professional memberships include the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, the Historical Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the Mystery Writers of America. I am the past Program Coordinator and the business blog writer for the Sisters in Crime New England chapter I started and continue to moderate the Sisters in Crime New England Short Story Group. My thriller short story, “Payback,” originally published in Fiction River’s Hard Choices anthology, appears in The Best American Mystery Stories, 2019.