Kristina McMorris is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author published by Sourcebooks Landmark, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Kensington Books. Her novels have garnered more than twenty national literary awards and nominations, including the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, RWA’s RITA® Award, and a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction.

At age nine, she began creatively expressing herself when she embarked on a five-year stint as the host of an Emmy® and Ollie award-winning kids’ television program. Being half Japanese, Kristina jokes that she discovered a genetic kinship with the camera early in life and continued to nurture that relationship by acting in many independent and major films while living in Los Angeles.

In 2001, deciding sleep was highly overrated, she compiled hundreds of her grandmother’s favorite recipes for a holiday gift that quickly evolved into a self-published cookbook. With proceeds benefiting the Food Bank, Grandma Jean’s Rainy Day Recipes sold at such stores as Borders and was heavily featured in regional media. It was while gathering information for the book’s biographical section when Kristina happened across the letters her grandfather mailed to his “sweetheart” during his wartime naval service—a collection that years later inspired McMorris to pen her first novel, a WWII love story titled Letters From Home.

Since her debut released in 2011, Kristina’s published works have expanded to include the novels Bridge of Scarlet Leaves, The Pieces We Keep, and The Edge of Lost, in addition to her novellas in the anthologies A Winter Wonderland and Grand Central. Her latest historical novel, The Ways We Hide, is a sweeping World War II tale of an illusionist whose recruitment by British intelligence sets her on a perilous, heartrending path – inspired by true accounts.  She also collaborated with bestselling authors Ariel Lawhon and Susan Meissner on When We Had Wings, an interwoven tale about a trio of World War II nurses stationed in the South Pacific who wage their own battle for freedom and survival. It’s a sweeping story based on the true experiences of nurses dubbed “the Angels of Bataan,” three women shift in and out of each other’s lives through the darkest days of the war, buoyed by their unwavering friendship and distant dreams of liberation. Her newest children’s book, Ellie Mae Dreams Big! (January 2024) is a delightful story of a girl whose big dreams are far from ordinary.