Andy Demsky knew he wanted to be a writer as early as the third grade, growing up in the rural town of Gentry, Arkansas (population 1,306). While the town itself had no literary culture, he grew up in a house filled with books, he loved reading, and had great admiration for his grandmother and his great aunt who were both published writers. Once when Andy got into trouble the worst punishment his father could devise was to ban him from visiting the library for two weeks.

When he was 9, the family television broke and his parents didn’t bother to replace it for five years. He filled his time making radio shows on his cassette player, drawing cartoon likenesses of Jimmy Carter, producing puppet shows, and pretending the pastures all around the house where battle fields where vast armies gathered for war.

In college Andy wrote plays and comedic skits, which he and his friends performed. He was the editor of his college newspaper and worked as a DJ at a classical radio station in Lincoln, Nebraska. He also started writing short stories, and worked as an intern at a magazine one summer in Hagerstown, Maryland, where he read the slush pile, unsolicited short stories sent to the magazine by aspiring writers, which was a great lesson in how not to write.

In the mid-1980s he spent a year working at a shortwave radio station located outside of Forli, Italy, which actually means he spent an enormous amount of time reading, drinking wine, traveling, staying in rundown hotels, trying to pick up girls on trains, bars and discos, and seeing some of the greatest art and architecture ever produced.

Back in the U.S. in 1986 Andy got a PR job at a health care corporation in Kansas City. While there he joined a writers group and won his first fiction contest – a short story contest in Kansas City Magazine. In the years that followed he wrote three novels that he eventually tossed in the trash.

In 1988 Andy moved to Napa, California and worked in PR for a hospital and continued to write fiction. He was published several times in a local literary magazine and wrote yet another novel which also went into the trash. In 1997 he got a job at the local newspaper, Napa Valley Register, where he was an editor and columnist for several years before going out on his own. As a freelancer he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and travel pieces for Better Homes and Gardens.

During this time he wrote several young adult novels for Pacific Press, including Dark Refuge, and ghost-wrote three other novels for various publishers for adults.

His most recent writing projects are screenplays, his first was optioned by a production company in Hollywood at the end of 2008. He is presently working on new scripts. He lives in Napa, California, with his wife, two kids, a dog named Fern, and a glorious Ron Burns print of the dog version of The Last Supper.