Denise Nicholas, actress and novelist, is best known for her roles on ABC TV’s Room 222 for which she received two Golden Globe Nominations and on In the Heat of the Night(NBC) for which she also wrote. She is the author of the novel Freshwater Road, published by Agate in 2005 and included in the Best Books of that year by The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, New York Newsday and the Chicago Tribune. Freshwater Road received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and was a Books Sense Pick. In 2006, Denise won the Best First Novel Award from the American Library Association’s Black Caucus and the Zora Neal Hurston-Richard Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. She attended the Community of Writers in 2001.