AnnaLisa Grant completed her undergraduate degree in Human Services at Wingate University and her Master’s degree in Counseling from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. During her thirteen years in the Human Services field, AnnaLisa worked with children in group homes and foster care, and spent two years in private practice counseling individuals, families, and couples.

When her father was in a near fatal car accident in 2010, AnnaLisa’s best coping skill turned out to be writing. Five months after the accident, when all the what ifs would not go away, AnnaLisa started writing Layla Weston’s story in The Lake. She had no idea what she was going to do with the story. In fact, she wrote sixty-four pages before she told her husband what she was doing. By then it was clear that Layla had a long story to tell and there were multiple books on the horizon.

In 2013, after all three YA novels in The Lake Series were written and she had let them sit long enough, AnnaLisa took matters into her own hands and self-published the titles within just a few months of each other. Received well by readers young and not-so-young alike, The Lake Series has enjoyed breakout success, selling over a million copies.

Oxblood, the first installment of the Victoria Asher Series, published late 2016 and revised in 2021, has been optioned for film/TV.

AnnaLisa is represented by Italia Gandolfo of GH Literary. AnnaLisa has been married to her super awesome husband Donavan since 2001 and lives in North Carolina with their two ridiculously beautiful children.