Paulette Boudreaux

Biography

Paulette Boudreaux has always been a storyteller. Growing up in Mississippi if someone said, “You’re telling a story,” by story she meant an elaborate, embellished lie dressed up to look like truth. Paulette was full of stories, even back then. They poured out as she walked home with friends from school and flowed through her head as she lay on her back in her yard watching the stars when the world was asleep.

Paulette honed her skills by listening, eavesdropping on her mother and her friends as they straightened each other’s hair, and by reading every kind of story she could get her hands on.

Over the years, family and friends went from saying, “Girl, quit telling stories,” to asking, Will you tell us a story?

She didn't think of writing stories down until she got an “A” on a poem written for her eighth-grade English class. She realized then that writing her ideas down could have its benefits. When it came time to decide what she wanted to be when she grew up, the answer was easy—a writer.

Paulette completed her first novel which wound up in the bottom of a drawer. A few years later, while working full-time as a writing instructor in California, she published a handful of stories and finished novel number two, which won the Lee Smith Novel Prize at Carolina Wren Press, the IP Book Awards silver medal for best Southern fiction 2016, and was a Finalist for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize 2017.

You can find her at pauletteboudreaux.com.