photo by Bruce Heinsius
Tonya Plank is an award-winning, best-selling author of contemporary fiction and romance novels. Her first novel, Swallow, a dramedy about a lawyer with the psychosomatic disorder, Globus Hystericus, won gold medals in the Independent Publisher and Living Now Book Awards and was a finalist in the ForeWord Book of the Year and National Indie Excellence Awards. Books in her Infectious Rhythm ballroom romance series have been nominated for InD’Tale’s Rone awards.
Originally from Phoenix, Arizona, she’s spent many years working as an appellate public defender in New York, where she also competed in amateur ballroom dance competitions. From 2006 to 2011, she wrote a blog called Swan Lake Samba Girl through which she journaled the trials and tribulations of learning to dance as an adult and reviewed concert dance in New York City. The blog received accolades from James Wolcott of Vanity Fair and Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal, and she was interviewed about the popularity of television dance competitions by CNN.
Compassionate about animals, she is also a volunteer legislative advocate for a national animal protection organization and she helps run a bookshop for an animal-centric nonprofit. She and her dogs currently make their home in the Finger Lakes region of Western New York where she is hard at work on a paranormal mystery series inspired by her numerous animal companions past and present.
