Phillips (she/her) is a freelance writer and author. She began her writing career at the Chicago Tribune where she wrote a syndicated column along with feature stories on music and the arts. She has written eight non-fiction MG books, six for American Girl and two for Scholastic. She’s also contributed design and travel stories to Coastal Living, Art News, Country Living and other magazines. Brooks has received residencies from Vermont Studio Center, the David and Julia White Artist’s Colony in Costa Rica, VCCA, and the Studios of Key West. She is the 2013 winner of the Key West Literary Seminar’s Marianne Russo Award, given annually to an emerging fiction writer of exceptional merit. In 2019 she co-founded the Rowland Writers Retreat, which funds ten two-week residencies for women authors at Rowland House in upstate New York. Her novel, The Grove, a coming-of-age story set in a Florida orange grove in the 1960s, was published by Penguin Random House in 2023.