Kaylie Jones is an award-winning novelist and screenplay writer. She is the acclaimed author of A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (which was made into the Merchant Ivory film starring Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Hershey and won the New York Public Library Young Adult Fiction Award), Celeste Ascending, As Soon as it Rains, Quite the Other Way, Speak Now, and Lies My Mother Never Told Me: A Memoir (William Morrow). The daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist James Jones (From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line) she chairs the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, which awards $10,000 annually to an unpublished first novel. Her screenplay Anor of Aquatain, written with her husband, Kevin Heisler, won the gold medal at the Houston Film Festival, while her original screenplay Limbo, won a New York Women In Film Screenwriting Award. A Writer in Residence in the New York City public schools through Teachers & Writers Collaborative and a creative writing teacher at the MFA Program in Writing at Long Island University's Southampton campus, she is a sought after keynote speaker at writers' conferences and festivals, libraries, and universities. She is also a black belt in taekwondo.

Lies My Mother Never Told Me is Jones' story of her struggle to overcome her addiction to alcohol and flourish as a writer beneath the looming shadow of her famous father and her emotionally abusive, alcoholic mother. Raised in the Hamptons via France among the glitterati that orbited her famous father, Jones struggled to find herself, both as an independent woman and as a novelist. She grew up watching her glamorous mother Gloria, a stand-in for Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, and her famous father, James Jones, National Book Award-winning author of From Here to Eternity, entertain the likes of Bill Styron, Irwin Shaw, Willie Morris, and many more. When she was old enough to attend parties with her parents, she mingled with Henry Kissinger, Norman Mailer, and John Steinbeck. The memoir is an intense, searing story of personal evolution, family secrets, and a woman's journey, fraught with the pain of discovery and loss, to find her own voice.

Jones was born in Paris, France and attended French schools (she is fluent in French) until she returned with her family to the U.S. in 1974. She began to study Russian as her third language at age eight, and continued to study the language and literature throughout her four undergraduate years at Wesleyan University and her two years at Columbia University's School of the Arts, where she received her MFA in Writing. Her first novel, As Soon As It Rains, was published in 1986. She continued her Russian studies at the Harriman Institute at Columbia (1986-87), and spent six weeks at the Pushkin Institute for Russian Studies in Moscow in the summer of 1984, and six months there in the winter and spring of 1987, which resulted in her second novel, Quite the Other Way (Doubleday, 1989). While writing both novels, Jones worked at Poets & Writers, Inc. in the Readings/Workshops Program and later as the assistant to the Director of Development. She fell in love with the poetry written by underprivileged children in the workshops she helped fund. As a result, she became a Writer in Residence in the New York City public schools through Teachers & Writers Collaborative.

Jones has been a manuscript reader for Book of the Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club (now Bookspan) for over 12 years. Between novels, she writes short stories and screenplays. Jones lives in New York City with her husband and their daughter.

Lies My Mother Never Told Me: Issues Facing Adult Children of Alcoholics

From Here to Eternity: The Literature of World War II and the Work of James Jones

Lush Life: The Lifelong Journey of Addiction and Recovery

Unlocking The Memoir or Novel Within

Building Self-Esteem Through Self-Defense: Lessons from a Taekwondo Black Belt

The Inheritance Curse: When Leaving Wealth to Children Goes Wrong

Inspirational, Authors, Alcohol & Drug Abuse, Health, Addiction,