Judith Guest won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for her first novel, Ordinary People, which was made into the multi-Academy Award-winning 1980 film of the same name. Her other novels are Second Heaven, Killing Time in St. Cloud (with Rebecca Hill), Errands, and The Tarnished Eye.

Judith was born in 1936 in Detroit, Michigan, where she grew up and attended school. She graduated from the University of Michigan in 1958 with a BA in Education and married her college sweetheart, Larry LaVercombe. She now spends her winters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where her family lives, and her summers at her cabin in northern Michigan. She has three children and seven grandchildren. She is also the great niece of poet Edgar A. Guest, who was the Poet Laureate of Michigan and wrote a poem a day for the Detroit Free Press for forty years. That is the source of her endurance; she can write for a very long time and not get tired.