I grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and spent my childhood hanging around the Wake Forest University campus where my father taught Physics. My mother was a high school history teacher in the Forsyth County Schools.

I always wanted to be a writer. In first grade, I wrote and illustrated a story called “The Adventures of Little Horse and Little Lamb” on wide-lined paper. In fifth grade I tried writing a novel about a girl and a boy who went on a grueling barefoot quest across North Carolina to find penicillin for their younger brother who had tonsillitis. I never really established the reason why the kids couldn’t just go to the drug store. Both stories lived in boxes in my old bedroom at my parents’ house for many years. That was probably a very good place for them to stay!

I graduated from Duke University and then received an MA in Communications with a major in writing for Radio, Television and Motion Pictures from UNC-Chapel Hill. After that, I worked for several years writing and researching public television programs for UNC-TV in Chapel Hill, and later worked in the training division of a large accounting firm. For the next 15 years I worked as a free-lancer, writing pretty much whatever people hired me to write -- articles, speeches, training tapes, brochures, and even menus!

After our daughters were born, I remembered my childhood dream to write my own stories, and realized that time was going by and I hadn’t even tried. I began to take writing workshops at the Writers’ Center in Bethesda, Maryland. I practiced and practiced and practiced and finally, after I’d written about twenty stories, I published one. It was called “Under the Jello,” and it was later reprinted in Spider Magazine. The day I received that letter was one of the happiest days of my life. After my grandmother died, I inherited the letters and photos she’d saved over the course of her life, beginning in the 1910’s. These photos and letters were the basis for my first novel, Eleanor Hill (Carus), which won the North Carolina Juvenile Literature Award. After that, I published eight other novels and a novella for young readers: Princesses of Atlantis (Carus), Write Before Your Eyes (Delacorte), the 5-book Sisters in All Seasons series (Zondervan), One Week of You (Blue Crow), and One Week of the Heart (Blue Crow). By then, I’d written fictionalized stories from my grandmother’s childhood, my own childhood, and the childhood of my daughters. My daughters had left for college. I no longer felt an authentic closeness with adolescent voices, and my story ideas became about adult characters. So, I went back to school for my MFA in Fiction from Queens University of Charlotte, made the transition to writing for adults, and in 2023, the first two of my adult novels were published — Between the Sky and the Sea (Dragonblade) and Ladies’ Day (CamCat Books).

In addition to my writing and writing-related jobs, I have also been a tongue-tied disc jockey, a radio copywriter, a zoned-out waitress, and a disorganized but trustworthy veterinary hospital payroll manager. For one job I even learned to drive a forklift! I was never very good at any of these jobs, so it’s a good thing the writing thing has worked out. Seriously, being part of the writing community is one of my greatest joys and I am very grateful.

I live in Davidson, North Carolina, with my husband, who is a retired veterinarian, two cats who love catnip, and a sweet chihuahua who has played Bruiser Woods in Legally Blonde: The Musical. We love our frequent visits from our grown daughters and their husbands.