Carol Ferring Shepley graduated from Wellesley College, majoring in art history and English literature. She has written for Money, Time, and Harper’s Bazaar and is a former art critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and professor of art history. She is also the author of several books, winning the Independent Publisher Gold Medal Award for Best Regional Nonfiction in 2009 for Movers and Shakers, Scalawags and Suffragettes: Tales from Bellefontaine Cemetery and the St. Louis Book Award in 2015 for St. Louis – An Illustrated Timeline.  Shepley and her husband have three daughters.