It is passion that drives me – a passion for history retold properly that includes women. Fueled by the fact that as a late returning student I learned about many remarkable women that I had never heard of, like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and others. How could I be in my forties and never have heard of these women? The result was I switched my major from Anthropology, earning my BA in Women’s Studies and MA in Feminism and Social Justice. 

For over thirty years I collected bits and pieces about obscure women: names, quotes, on cocktail napkins and scraps of paper or entire articles printed out. I never intended to write a book, but when I retired for the second time, in 2017, I began to wade through my collections of women, making lists of those who spoke the loudest. That led to research and diving deeper. A friend suggested that the women I’d written about in  the Free Press “needed a book.” The women found me, and they were amazing. That led to the first book, They Persisted – unknown women born in the 1800s who accomplished outstanding things. They were lawyers, reformers, suffragists, engineers, physicians, and more, all way before their time. The second book took on a life of its own when I discovered the women test pilots from WWII. I abhor war, but the women, pilots, cryptographers, and photojournalists — kept finding me. The narrative was not about war, but about some extraordinary women during that period. That is how They Roared was born. I am once again collecting names and thinking about possibilities for a third book. A work in progress.