Shelly grew up in Orangeburg, South Carolina, the daughter of a college professor and a social worker. She spent a lot of time in the library reading books in the solarium on top of the biology building where her father taught.
Shelly holds an English degree from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. After graduation, she began a career in high-tech as a technical writer for a large company in Alabama, then she moved to Silicon Valley in 1994 at the height of the Internet boom. After the last start-up she worked for was acquired, she pursued a new direction in life and took a job at a large Fortune 500 company while pursuing new hobbies for the first time in her life! Ultimately it was a fiction writing class that inspired Shelly to become a storyteller and writer.
Now, her short stories have appeared in the GW Review, Slow Trains, the Dos Passos Review, Epiphany, the Coe Review, Palo Alto Weekly, and The Writer magazine. She is the author of the novelThe Moment of Everything (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette) which has been translated to a dozen languages around the world. She has taught numerous workshops and classes for the California Writers Club, Cabrillo College, and other private organizations.
Shelly & her husband John moved to Grants Pass, OR in 2023 and shortly thereafter she co-founded (along with Juliet Meredith) the Rogue Writers Collective, a nonprofit organization through which she teaches classes and workshops on many different aspects of fiction. Their mission is to build a thriving writing community in Southern Oregon through the work of connecting local writers with one another, identifying and creating opportunities to hone their craft, and removing any roadblocks that stand between them and their writing goals.