Adriana Trigiani is an American best-selling author of eighteen books, playwright, television writer/producer, film director/screenwriter/producer, and entrepreneur based in New York City. Trigiani has published a novel a year since 2000. Early life and career Inspired by her Italian American heritage and Appalachian childhood in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, Trigiani arrived in New York in 1985 after attending Saint Mary's College in Indiana. Trigiani made her off-Broadway debut in New York City as a playwright in 1985 at the Manhattan Theater Club with Secrets of the Lava Lamp, directed by Stuart Ross. From 1988 to 1998, she created scripts for television sitcoms, including The Cosby Show (1984) and its spin-off A Different World (1987). She was the writer and executive producer of City Kids for ABC/Jim Henson Productions, she was an executive producer and writer of Growing Up Funny, a television special for Lifetime which garnered an Emmy nomination for Lily Tomlin. Trigiani has written eighteen best-sellers in fiction and non-fiction,wrote and directed the award-winning documentary Queens of the Big Time (1996 Audience Award Hamptons International Film Festival and 1997 Palm Springs International Film Festival). She wrote and directed the major motion picture Big Stone Gap, based on her debut novel and shot entirely on location in her hometown. In 2018 she directed Then Came You in Scotland, starring Craig Ferguson and Kathie Lee Gifford (screenwriter). She adapted her novel Very Valentine for Lifetime Television, it premiered in June 2019 starring Kelen Coleman and Jacqueline Bisset. Trigiani co-founded with Nancy Bolmeier-Fisher The Origin Project, an in-school writing program in Appalachia that serves over 1700 students in her home state Virginia. The program has received many awards, including citations from the Virginia Council for the Humanities (2018), Helen M. Lewis Community Service Award (2015), and the William P. Kanto Memorial Award at The University of Virginia at Wise (2017). As novelist and filmmaker Trigiani authored the best-selling Big Stone Gap series, including Big Stone Gap (2000), Big Cherry Holler (2001), Milk Glass Moon (2002), and Home to Big Stone Gap (2006), set in her Virginia hometown; and the bestselling Valentine trilogy, the tale of a woman working to save her family's shoe company in Greenwich Village. Trigiani also wrote the Viola books, about a clever teenage filmmaker from Brooklyn, for young adults. Trigiani's acclaimed stand-alone novels include Lucia, Lucia (2003), The Queen of the Big Time (2004), and Rococo (2005). Trigiani's