Anna Jeffrey grew up reading and telling stories. In the elementary grades, she competed in story telling contests where several kids gathered in a room and listened to someone read a story, then repeated it to an audience. When she got older, she competed in extemporaneous story telling, where she made up her own stories and repeated them to audiences. And still later, she competed in essay writing contests.
Living where television reception and even phone service were sketchy at best, she was a voracious reader and cut her reading teeth on writers like Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck and Willa Cather. She always had a secret notion that someday she would write. Then life happened
A few years ago she realized time is fleeting and her lifelong urge became a drive. Reams of paper and three computers later, she succeeded in selling one of her efforts to New American Library. It happened overnight after five years of unrelenting effort.
A year later, she and her sister collaborated on a romantic comedy they sold to Avon under the pen name of Dixie Cash.
In the years Anna has spent writing, she has never grown tired of it and continues learning the craft. But where she used to lose herself in someone else's writing, she now loses herself in her own. She figures she has somewhere around 10,000 stories to tell and not nearly enough time to do it. She writes every day--early mornings, in the middle of the afternoon and in the middle of the night. Even when she's not putting words to paper, she's often wandering through a story character's head.
Anna is a fifth generation Texan. Her ancestors were pioneers and homesteaders in Texas, during and after the Civil War. She and her husband live in a small town in Texas, near Fort Worth. She lived in the Pacific Northwest over twenty years where she learned about life in the Western states. Her stories have a definite flavor of the contemporary American West.
