I grew up in Springfield, Missouri, on a steady diet of Bible stories and old TV westerns. Maybe that's why I like to write about the past.

Or maybe it was Jo March in Little Women. She was a tomboy and bookworm – just like me. But somehow she managed to become a writer. And almost from the very beginning, that's what I wanted to be, too.

My first real job was as a newspaper staff writer on an old-fashioned Society page. I wrote about weddings and Girl Scout jamborees and old ladies who carved little statues out of gourds. Then I moved to South Dakota, where there wasn’t a market for Society page staff writers. So I began a career in advertising and public relations.

Over the next twenty years, I wrote about everything from Mount Rushmore to Water Piks, Navajo rugs to basketball shoes. Along the way, I lived in Kansas, Colorado, and Oregon.

In 1994, I left the corporate world behind and started writing books for young adults.  My first novel -- Ghost Horses -- was published two years later.  I also launched a second career, teaching professional and creative writing classes at universities in Colorado, Washington, and Oregon. 

I continue to write Young Adult fiction, but in 2007, my writing career took another turn:  I published my first book for adult readers, Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer's Life.   This was followed in 2014 with the New York Times best-seller, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography.  My third Wilder book, Too Good to Be Altogether Lost: Rediscovering Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Books, will be published on July 1, 2025.

Like Jo March, I’ve become an “American authoress.” But the journey has been longer, harder, and more fulfilling than I imagined all those years ago when I first read Little Women.