Alison Cochrun

Alison Cochrun taught high school English before she began publishing queer romantic comedies. Kiss Her Once for Me, from Atria in 2022, runs over Christmas in Oregon: Ellie Oliver, an animator out of work, poses as the fiancée of her landlord Andrew Kim-Prescott so he can claim an inheritance, then finds at the family gathering that his sister Jack is the woman she spent one snowbound day with a year before. It won a Lambda Literary Award. The Charm Offensive came first, in 2021, putting a burned-out tech prodigy on a reality dating show opposite the producer assigned to make him marketable, and it is as much about anxiety and medication as about romance. Here We Go Again loads two rival teachers into a van with the dying mentor they share. Cochrun lives outside Portland with her wife and two children.