Amanda Cockrell

Amanda Cockrell is an American author of historical fiction, young-adult literature and speculative fiction. Raised in Ojai, California, she worked as a newspaper reporter and advertising copywriter before entering academia. She founded Hollins University’s graduate programmes in children’s literature in 1992 and directed them until her retirement in 2018. Cockrell has received fiction fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts.

Cockrell has published several novels under the name Damion Hunter, including The Legions of the Mist, The Wall at the Edge of the World and the Centurions series, which explore Roman Britain, the imperial frontier and conflicts between Roman soldiers and local peoples. Under her own name, she wrote the Deer Dancers and Horse Catchers trilogies, mythological historical novels set among the pre-Columbian peoples of the American Southwest. Her other works include Pomegranate Seed, set during the Hollywood blacklist; the young-adult novel What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay; and Coyote Weather, which follows several characters through 1960s California and the Vietnam War.