Amanda Cockrell is a native of California, the daughter of a screenwriter and a novelist. She holds a master’s degree in English and creative writing from Hollins College and is currently managing editor of Hollins University’s literary journal, The Hollins Critic. Before retiring, she was director of the University’s graduate program in children’s literature, and also taught creative writing and children’s literature in the university’s Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program and Creative Writing MFA program. She has received fellowships in fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and in the past has also been a newspaper reporter and a copywriter for both an ad agency and a rock radio station.

Her newest book is Coyote Weather, a novel of the Vietnam War era. Writing as Damion Hunter, she is the author of The Borderlands series, novels of Roman Britain.

As Damion Hunter she is also the author of The Legions of the Mist, The Wall at the Edge of the World, and the Centurions series. As Amanda Cockrell, she is also the author of the young adult novel What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay; Pomegranate Seed, a novel set in a fictional version of her California home town; as well as The Deer Dancers and The Horse Catchers trilogies, mythological novels of the American Southwest; and The Moonshine Blade, a comic thriller set in her current home, southwestern Virginia.