Chantal Corcoran was born north of the border, in the single stoplight town of Chapleau, Ontario. She was raised in and around the Greater Toronto Area, but primarily in a General Motors town just east of there, a characteristic place unofficially dubbed The Shwaw. As a young woman she had a successful stint selling real estate in and around this same area. As a young mother, she was transplanted to Des Moines, Iowa, where she spent another ten years nurturing children, hers and others, as a stay-home mother and daycare provider. Now, with her husband, and three growing children, she resides in the uniquely foreign locale of Las Vegas, Nevada, where she writes fiction and nonfiction and a little freelance. It's been quite a trip, and still she's reeling in the neon; and still the north beckons her home. She often goes there in her stories.

Chantal studied English Literature at Carleton University where she fell in love with writers like Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, as well as Margaret Atwood and, especially, Alice Munro. Then, much more recently, she completed her masters degree (an MFA in fiction) at Bennington College, Vermont, where she finally came to know Hemingway, Twain and Steinbeck, as well as Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen and Richard Ford. She's learned from them all.  

It was about ten years ago, when Richard Russo's Empire Falls transported her to a town that felt so much like home, that she developed the urge to write.

---