Background
Young-Stone was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1971 and grew up in Chester, Virginia.
Young-Stone was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1971 and grew up in Chester, Virginia.
When she was seventeen she moved to Richmond, Virginia, where she attended Virginia Commonwealth University, graduating in 1992 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English.
She has published two novels, The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors and Above Us Only Sky. From 1994 to 1995 she returned there to earn a master"s degree in Teaching Secondary English. After some years teaching high-school and middle-school English in Nottoway and Henrico counties, she again returned to Virginia Commonwealth University in 2002 to study fiction writing full-time.
Her thesis, completed in 2005, became her first novel: The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors was published in 2010 and is about two young people, one of whom has been struck by lightning twice and the other who lost his mother to a lightning strike.
Her second novel, Above Us Only Sky, was published in 2015 and centers on a family in which women in two generations are born with wings.