A native New Yorker, Ashley E. Sweeney is the winner of the Nancy Pearl Book Award and more than 15 other literary awards for her novels "Eliza Waite," "Answer Creek" and "Hardland." "The Irish Girl," based on the author's great-grandmother's story of coming alone to America from Ireland at age 13 in 1886, released in December 2024. Sweeney lives in the Pacific Northwest and Tucson. She is at work on a fifth novel set in Tucson in the 1930s.