The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (37 page)

My unending gratitude, inspiration, and love go out to the following people:

The incomparable Richard S. Pine, who is a superhero among agents, with a quick wit and dedication to his clients of hurricane proportions, whose name I will forever say before drinking a glass of wine. Christine Kopprasch, a fiercely kind editor, who guided with panache and gentility, provided room to explore, an accompanying compass when necessary, and the beautiful sparks of an early friendship. Molly Stern, an icon of publishing, whose enthusiasm and energy championed this novel in ways I can never fully comprehend—one conversation with you, and I was smitten. Thank-you, in every language on earth, cannot properly express this gratitude.

To the team at InkWell, including Alexis Hurley, Charlie Olsen, Eliza Rothstein; to the team at Crown, including Maya Mavjee, Rachel Rokicki, Rachel Meier, Jay Sones, and Annsley Rosner, for their creative and inventive marketing and publicity; to Chris Brand, for his brilliant, spot-on jacket, and Lauren Dong, for her exquisite interior design; to Mary Anne Stewart and Patricia Shaw, for their tireless copyediting and production editing; and to Howie Sanders at UTA, for his cinematic support in Noa’s latter stages. Thank-you also to Marion Donaldson, Sam Eades, Jo Liddiard at Headline, and Mark Lucas at Lucas Alexander Whitley in the UK for creating a
second home market for me, and to all the publishers around the world who have embraced Noa and Marlene.

Many thanks also go out to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the University of Texas School of Law’s Capital Punishment Clinic and its outstanding professors, including Rob Owen and Maurie Levin, and my professors at Temple Law, for providing the foundation that enabled me to write this story.

Several chapters would not have been written without generous grants from the folks at Byrdcliffe Artist Colony in Woodstock, New York, and Circle of Misse in the Loire Valley, France, who provided solitude and time to write. Thank-you also to the University of Pennsylvania’s English and Creative Writing Departments and the Kelly Writers House for furnishing a creative home for me when I first started writing, and to the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing MA, for cementing that home in the United Kingdom. And to my writing teachers and mentors over the years, especially Jill Dawson and Lorene Cary.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the support and dear friendship of early readers and outstanding writers: Emily Bullock, Emma Sweeney, Michelle Pakula, Mark Pryor, Saul Nadata, Harriet Levin Millan, and the Austin Fiction Writers Group.

Finally, thank-you to my family. My parents, Charles and Kathi Silver, who instilled in me a passion for the arts, gave me a parental nudge into law school, and a childhood filled with books, for which I am forever grateful. To my in-laws, Etty and Mordechai Moldovan, who unconditional support has never dimmed. To my siblings—Arielle, Sasha, Yael, and Adrian—whose closest friendships have comforted and defined me. Mostly, thank-you to my partner in life, Amir, who, before I blurted out my secret literary ambitions, told me when we first met that he always wanted to marry a writer. Since then, you have read draft after draft with the same enthusiasm as the first day we met. Quite simply, without you, I’d be lost in the clouds; and for that, I suspect, my parents thank you, too.

E
LIZABETH
L. S
ILVER
grew up in New Orleans and Dallas. She has taught ESL in Costa Rica, has taught English Literature and Writing at Drexel University and St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, has worked in publishing in New York and as an attorney in Texas and California. For two years, she served as a judicial clerk for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin, where she worked on several death penalty cases. She has been a writer-in-residence at the Byrdcliffe Artist Colony in Woodstock, New York, and at Circle of Misse in the Loire Valley, France. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, the MA program in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in England, and Temple University Beasley School of Law, she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband.