Rysa Walker

Rysa Walker an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and mysteries. Her first novel, Timebound, was the 2013 Grand Prize winner of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.

Early life and education Walker was born and raised in Northwest Florida. After graduating from St. Andrews University in North Carolina, she earned a PhD in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Career Walker taught political science and history at several universities before beginning to write fiction full time in 2014. After her family relocated to Cary, North Carolina in 2006 for her husband's job, she shifted to teaching her college courses online so she could work from home.

Walker's first novel, Timebound (The CHRONOS Files Book One), was originally self-published as Time's Twisted Arrow in 2012. In January 2013, she entered the book into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, competing against 10,000 self-published and unpublished novels. The Publishers Weekly review of the book during the competition called the book's heroine, Kate Pierce-Keller, the "Katniss Everdeen of time travel," adding that the story reads like a mash-up of Jack Finney's Time and Again and Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, and works as a contemporary tribute to Robert Heinlein's juvenile novels of the 1950s.

On June 15, 2013, Timebound won the contest's grand prize, leading to a $50,000 advance and a contract with Skyscape, an Amazon Publishing imprint. Walker has said the prize allowed her to take a year off from teaching to write full-time. Five additional CHRONOS novels were published through the Skyscape and 47North imprints beginning in 2016. A separate science fiction series, The Delphi Trilogy, was published by Skyscape beginning in 2017.

Reception Time's Edge, the second book in The CHRONOS Files, appeared at number ten on the Wall Street Journal'''s bestselling fiction e-books list for October 30, 2014. The Delphi Effect was a finalist for the 2018 International Thriller Writers Awards, a 2017 Amazon Editors' Pick for Best Science Fiction, and a 2017 Junior Library Guild selection.

The Publishers Weekly review of Now, Then, and Everywhen praised what it described as a twisty narrative blending the past and the future, predicting that fans of intelligent time-travel stories would be rewarded.