A person’s history is who they are, so I’ll fill you in on my life. . .
Born 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’s 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, worked with the Arizona Kidney Foundation and served 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 2005 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 which won the Gold Medal from the national organization of Independent Publishers, as well as three Glyph trophies from the Arizona Book Publishers Association: Best Novel for 2007, best Spirit of Arizona, and Best Multicultural Fiction.
Published in 2009, Ring of Fire; 2010, The Fall From Paradise Valley; and 2011, To A Certain Degree. White River will be published in 2013.
My short stories have appeared in the Desert Sleuth’s Sisters in Crime anthology, So West So Wild, and Second Wind Publishing,Change Is In The Wind.
