“If you asked me what I came into this world to do, then I will tell you: I came to live out loud.” - Emile Zola
Originally from Phoenix, Arizona, Tonya Plank currently works as an appellate public defender in New York City representing indigent defendants on appeal. She has published law review articles on human rights, welfare reform, gender issues, and law and literature, and she holds an M.A. in European history.
She is also a writer and recently completed her first novel, SWALLOW, a darkish comedy in the style of Augusten Burroughs, Nick Hornby, or early Martin Amis, about a young woman from a poor "prison" town and low-income family -- including a trailer-park-residing sister and porn-obsessed father -- who gets into a prestigious eastern law school, and the way she is treated by her fellow Ivy Leaguers and Manhattanite professionals as well as those back home. Just when career and love life seem to be blossoming, she develops a bizarre-seeming but not uncommon nervous disorder of Freudian proportions that tragicomically hinders first her ability to swallow, then to speak, and at one point, even just to breathe. Tonya is currently working on her second novel.
Finally, she is an amateur competitive Latin dancer. She loved ballet as a girl, and, as soon as she got a breather from her career, took it up again in New York. But, she soon discovered you can only go so far with the dance if you haven't spent hours on end doing it every day since you were, like three. So, one day (back in the day before Dancing With the Stars) she was walking down Broadway and saw a sign for a Ballroom and Latin studio and wondered what that was about. She checked it out and decided to take a Swing course, since that looked cute and 50s-ish and fun. But when she went to her first studio party and witnessed the International Latin teacher perform a Cha Cha with his advanced student, she was taken! She ended up falling in love with Samba and Rhumba, and soon realized if she incorporated theater arts lifts and tricks into her Latin, she could draw on her childhood passion. She currently performs in teacher/student showcases with her dance school and competes in local and not-so-local Latin Pro-Am competitions.