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Karin Cook lost her own mother to breast cancer when she was nineteen. "I couldn't not write about my mother's death," she has said. "It was the biggest event in my life." Cook grew up in Huntington, Long Island, was graduated from Vassar in 1990, and received her M.A. from the Creative Writing Program at New York University in 1992. Since then she has combined two careers, as a writer and a health educator; she currently works in the development office at The Door, a multi-service youth center in New York City. She has received writing fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Millay Colony.