Mermer Blakeslee was born, raised, and still lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York.[1] She has written two novels, Same Blood (Houghton Mifflin, 1989) and In Dark Water (Ballantine, 1998); the latter was selected by Barnes & Noble for its Discover Great New Writers series. She is also the author of the nonfiction work In the Yikes! Zone: A Conversation with Fear (Dutton, 2002). Blakeslee received three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in fiction and the 2006 Narrative Prize from Narrative Magazine for her story “Leenie.”