About

I was born in Louisiana of French-Irish-Spanish-ScotsIrish-English-Welsh-German stock. My mother’s ancestors were Quakers, runaways, indentured servants, Revolutionary War soldiers, French and Norman-French aristocrats, and just plain folks. Another soldier, this one from Chambéry, France, ensured that my father’s family would live for generations in the humid lowlands of southwestern Louisiana, at that time a colony of Spain.

As a teenager I attended the Academy of the Sacred Heart at Grand Coteau, where I discovered a love of literature and how to conjugate Latin verbs and all about the Chanson de Roland and Charlemagne, among other things. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that experience practically required that my future self would become a writer of historical fiction.