Rita Woods Books in Order

Rita Woods was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, a city that clearly matters to her. Long before she published fiction, she took a very different professional path, earning a BS in microbiology from Purdue University, a medical degree from Howard University College of Medicine, and completing her training at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

Medicine became her career, but stories never stopped following her around.

Woods has spent much of her adult life in and around Chicago, where she served as Medical Director of a wellness center caring for members of one of the country’s largest trade unions. She has also described herself as someone who kept writing in the margins of a busy life, while working full time, building a family life, and slowly shaping the kind of books she most wanted to see in the world.

That mix of practical work and imaginative drift helps explain her fiction. She likes history, magic, and the places where the two touch. She has said the spark for Remembrance came after she picked up a book on quantum mechanics, then later found herself walking through a family graveyard in Ohio and wondering what might happen if time and space could be bent into a sanctuary. That question became her debut novel, published in 2020.

Remembrance moves across Haiti, New Orleans, and present-day Ohio, connecting four women through loss, danger, and unusual power. At its center is a hidden refuge on the Underground Railroad called Remembrance. Readers who click with Woods often like this balance of sweeping history and intimate feeling, where the supernatural is not just decoration but part of how memory, fear, and survival are carried from one generation to the next.

She writes big ideas through very personal lives.

Her second novel, The Last Dreamwalker, keeps that interest in inheritance but shifts the setting to the Gullah-Geechee world off the coast of South Carolina. Layla Hurley, grieving her mother, inherits an island and learns that the nightmares that have shadowed her life are part of a family gift, or curse, called dreamwalking. The book reaches across nearly two centuries, pairing Layla’s story with that of her ancestor Gemma. It later won the Midlands Authors Award, and it shows Woods leaning even harder into family secrets, place, and the afterlife of old harms.

Then came The Edge of Yesterday, which brings her back to Detroit and into time travel again, this time through the story of Greer Coffey, a dancer whose life is knocked off course by illness, and Dr. Montgomery Gray, a Black physician in 1925 Detroit. The novel moves between 2025 and 1925, using romance, pressure, and historical change to ask what people owe to themselves, their families, and the futures they imagine.

Across all three books, you can see Woods returning to some of the same concerns: Black history that still feels close to the skin, women carrying knowledge that others overlook, and cities or landscapes that behave almost like characters. She is drawn to turning place into story, whether that means Detroit streets, a Gullah-Geechee island, or a hidden world just beside the one everyone else can see.

Off the page, Woods lives in suburban Chicago with her family and serves as a trustee on her local library board. She has also mentored young writers through Cinnamon Girls and been involved with AWP. Her public bio lists some of her favorite things in a refreshingly direct way: magic, books, history, coffee, and travel, with a special fondness for cemeteries.