A person’s history is who they are, so I’ll fill you in on my life. Born in Houston Texas, on June 27 at 8:03 p.m., making me a Cancer - creative, thank heavens, home-loving, romantic, moon child, water sign, birthstone pearl. I’m the middle child [ah!] of a sister and brother. But my father was a Midwesterner and my mother a New Yorker, so we didn’t stay in the Southwest. We lived in Chicago suburbs for a time, but eventually settled in my father’s home state of Ohio, where I did the rest of my growing up.
 
I went to Ohio State, majoring in Communications. I met my husband on a blind date [sort of. I knew who he was. A big time football player, which didn’t overly impress me, but when we went out, he did.] He graduated before me and had gotten an ROTC commission and was being sent to Germany. I had five credit hours to get my degree, but I wasn’t going to be left behind. I started planning the wedding, dropped out of school in December and we were married on the most frigid, snowy day in a decade, February 12.
  
Germany was a two year honeymoon, and we traveled everywhere. Cheap. We’d bought a little Austin Healy with all the wedding money and resources we could scrape together and took off in the little car whenever we could: Germany, England, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy. Austin Healy top down all the way.
 
Dick came back to graduate school, I began working in radio and television, then advertising. I’d written things all my life, but I found getting paid for it a particularly fine thing. But our two boys eventually came along. We came to Phoenix and loved it, couldn’t believe one could live like that in one’s own country—mountains, palm trees, orange blossoms, swimming pools and no snow. The boys were growing and our lives became a blur of baseball games and horse shows.
 
I went back to school and got my degree in French from Arizona State University. I was a docent at the Phoenix Art Museum for 20 years, work with the Arizona Kidney Foundation and serve on its Women’s Board and Board of Trustees. Dick serves on the board of Ballet Arizona, so we’re both active in that lovely dance world.
 
But it wasn’t until after my two sons were grown that I began writing fiction for publication in earnest. I worked at it, got better, got an agent, then a publisher. KACHINA was my first book, in 2005. It won the Arizona Book Publishers Association Glyph Award for fiction. CHANCE ENCOUNTERS came out in 2006 and it won an Honorable Mention with the Arizona Authors Association, along with a second for my poem Southwest Summer. PIMA ROAD was published in November of 2006, and BLUE TURQUOISE, WHITE SHELL was published in July of 2007.
  
We still live in Paradise Valley, Arizona. My sons married fabulous women and we have four grandchildren, two girls and two boys. I counted up our resident animals over the time we’ve lived here: We’ve had six dogs. Golden Retriever Steerforth is now in dog heaven. We’ve adopted two rescues - Barkis, a seven-year-old barky Golden Retriever with storm terrors, and Peaches, a calm fox-red five-year-old sweetheart Labrador Retriever. Every grocery list includes quantities of dog food.