Philip Beard is a recovering attorney and award-winning author of Dear Zoe, which was a Book Sense Pick, a Borders Original Voices selection, and was named by the American Library Association's "Booklist" as one of its Ten Best First Novels of the year. It has enjoyed a second life being taught in high school classrooms across the country and is currently being developed as a feature film. His latest novel, Swing, centered around an unlikely friendship between a 10 year-old boy and a legless Korean War veteran, recently received the 2016 IPPY Gold Medal for Contemporary Fiction. Praise for Swing: "Philip Beard's SWING is a novel to be savored"

• Sara Gruen, New York Times Bestselling author of Water for Elephants “…at once heartbreaking, uplifting and emotionally resonant. In a word, it’s beautiful." -Pittsburgh Magazine "SWING is richly rewarding...a tight, poignant coming of age novel...[that] will stay with you long after you put this book down." –Sports Illustrated “It wouldn’t be fair or accurate to call SWING a sports book. It’s too rare for that.” –The Sporting News “Every character—the absent father, the troubled sister, the mysterious wonder that is John Kostka—feels alive due to Beard‘s skillfully simple prose and dialogue. With SWING, Beard has hit it out of the park.” –Foreword Reviews “...just about perfect.” -The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Praise for Dear Zoe, “Like The Lovely Bones, it is a piercing look at how a family recovers from a devastating loss. Everything about this moving, powerful debut rings true.” – Booklist (starred review) “Dear Zoe is an almost flawless novel of self-discovery and redemption. It is the sort of book that a generation can call ‘theirs,’ a book that captures the trials of adolescence and the aching numbness of America in the aftermath of 9/11.” – The Press of Atlantic City “The whole novel rings with truth. By the end of it, we’re meditating on the ideas of loss and redemption, the ways in which personal tragedies get absorbed into larger ones, but never obliterated, never forgotten.” – The Buffalo News