Her sophomore year she transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she majored in journalism.
Burns worked for the Atlanta Journal and wrote under the pseudonym "Amy Larkin".
In 1975 she was diagnosed with lymphoma and began to change the family stories into a novel that would later become Cold Sassy Tree.
Burns received so many letters pleading for a follow-up novel that she began writing Leaving Cold Sassy.
Burns died of heart failure in 1990, at age 65, in a hospital in Atlanta, Georgia,[1] before finishing the manuscript, and the uncompleted novel was published in 1992 along with her notes.