I was born in North Carolina, but after brief stops in New Jersey and Nebraska, my family settled in Colorado, where I have lived since the age of six.

I have always enjoyed being other people. When I was a child, I spent hours pretending to be all kinds of historic and literary figures, from Helen Keller to Nancy Drew. In fact, I loved it so much so that my parents put me into acting lessons when I was nine, and the theatre became my passion. I held fast to my dreams of Broadway until my first year of college. Ever a practical person, I was working on a teaching license and a minor in English so that I would have a day job until my "big break." Much to my surprise, in the course of obtaining my teaching license, I felt called to the classroom as a high school English teacher. Acting was not my vocation after all.

I have taught every level of English, not to mention competitive speech and debate, bringing to the classroom a deep empathy for the literary characters that my students and I have studied. Though I was no longer acting, I remained drawn to the inner lives of fictional people.

In the late 1980s, I made my first attempt to create a few characters of my own in a historical romance novel, but then I had children, was teaching, coaching…life handed me a different set of priorities for a while.

In 1999, a tragic shooting incident in the school where I work left me in need of escape, so I returned to the romance novel I had once abandoned. That novel, heaven help it, will never see the light of day, but finishing it at last led me to write another and to find a wonderful agent. She sold that second novel and two others in 2004. Writing allowed me to again find joy in being many other people and to give them all the happy endings that I, myself, craved in the wake of that tragedy.

A decade has come and gone since the sad day that started me on this journey. I have learned that traditional, romantic happily-ever-afters are not the only satisfying endings for the stories I want to tell. Adversity, scars, broken hearts, and through them all, hope and strength, these are the things that make all our stories rich.

As for the rest of my own story, I am married to my high school sweetheart. We have two children, an adult son and a teenaged daughter. Both are avid readers and writers (imagine that) with a love of art and music. We also have two dogs with no appreciation for the humanities but who make sure I get away from the computer for plenty of walks.