CL Tolbert grew up on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, a culturally rich, beachy stretch of land with some of the best sunsets in the country. Early in her career she taught children with learning disabilities before moving on to law school. She spent most of her legal career working as defense counsel to large corporations and traveled throughout the country as regional and national counsel. She also had the unique opportunity of teaching third-year law students in a clinical program at a law school in New Orleans where she ran the Homelessness Law Clinic and learned, first hand, about poverty in that city. The experiences and impressions she has collected from the past forty years contribute to the stories she writes today. ​After winning the Georgia State Bar Association’s fiction writing contest in 2010 for a short story entitled Out From Silence, she devoted more time to writing. Retiring after thirty years of practicing law she developed the winning short story into a full scale novel by the same name. A new manuscript entitled The Redemption is currently in development. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and schnauzer Yoda, and visits her two children and three grandchildren as often as possible.