Born in New Orleans, I grew up in McComb, a small Mississippi railroad town just twenty miles north of the Louisiana state line. My father, a professional photographer, and my mother, who managed the studio in addition to retouching and hand coloring portraits, fed my imagination with their lively stories of growing up during the Great Depression. They also encouraged me in my pastimes of drawing, reading, and writing.

Those early affirmations were reinforced through my first published pieces which were cartoons for my junior high school newspaper. Editor of my junior college yearbook, I later worked as a staff writer for The Reflector, the student newspaper of Mississippi State University. At State I earned a bachelor’s degree in art education and studied communications. Later, I was certified to teach journalism. After graduating from college, I taught art and journalism for four years at St. Joseph High School in Jackson, Mississippi, where advising the yearbook and newspaper was part of my job. I then returned to my hometown to write for its local newspaper, The McComb Enterprise-Journal. That next year I married Frank Winn, a dentist, and we moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast where we have lived since 1982.

Throughout the years I was very fortunate to work as a writer and editor for several coastal newspapers, most recently as arts editor for the Ocean Springs Record. I covered myriad news events, took photographs, and wrote hundreds of feature stories. In addition to freelancing for mostly regional, and a few national magazines, I created various artworks in acrylics, watercolor, and pen and ink.

I also began to write fiction, something I’d wanted to do since my early teaching days. During a second stint as an educator—this time seven years at Resurrection Catholic Middle/High School in Pascagoula, Mississippi—I earned a master’s degree in art education and participated in three fiction-writing workshops at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. That’s when my novel took root. Thus began a long-lasting agenda of conferences, workshops, and seminars, all of which helped to form me as a writer.

I spent nearly eleven years submitting query letters to literary agents, being rejected, rewriting, submitting more queries, being rejected again, and rewriting again, again, and again. There were, however, times of celebration when an agent asked to read a full or partial manuscript. I was always grateful and encouraged whenever I received a personal response.

I have also been privileged to be part of a remarkable writing group. We call ourselves Women of Words (WOW). Interacting with these fine writers has been the most rewarding and educating experience for me. It was one of our members who encouraged me to query Joe Lee, the editor/publisher of Dogwood Press back in 2009. That query yielded a request for the first fifty pages, then the entire manuscript. Nearly eighteen months later I got the telephone call I’d been waiting for—publication at last!