I was born in Martinsville, Virginia on December 19, 1955 to Juanita Burch Arnoult, a Baptist beautician originally from Draper, North Carolina, and Joseph Henry Arnoult, a Catholic architect originally from Memphis, Tennessee. My mother wanted to be a movie star, my father wanted to be a fighter pilot. I wanted to be a cowgirl almost from the day I was born, but in forty-two years the opportunity never presented itself.

My father did accept payment once in the form of a Shetland pony named Buckshot, the orneriest pony who ever lived. No one could stay on his back. So for a time, I stopped thinking of riding and roping, and concentrated on watching cowboys in thirty-minute episodes on TV until detectives took over television.

Both of my parents had been married before. I had a half brother on each side; Joe Arnoult, Jr. and Tommy Mays were sixteen and twelve, respectively, when I came along. Everyone in my family and extended family told stories. When I was two years old my father fought a gorilla at a firemen's bazaar. When I was five Tommy lied about his age and joined the Navy. When I was eight my mother developed paranoid schizophrenia. I spent the next year at Villa Maria Academy, a Catholic boarding school for young girls. The following year my father went bankrupt, and mother and I went to live with my widowed grandmother and her spinster sister outside the little mill town of Fieldale, Virginia. In high school, I was a cheerleader, class president, and Junior-Senior Prom Chairman. During my junior year, I developed a real love of reading. It became difficult to ignore the blessings of such good material, so I decided to become a writer.

Shortly after that pivotal decision, I got married and, in short-order, became the mother of two beautiful and talented children. By twenty-five, I was divorced; I remained a single parent for nineteen years. I delivered newspapers, changed headings on library cards, worked as a chair-side dental assistant, was a secretary in an occupational therapy unit, helped counsel prisoners in a minimum security facility, received a BA in American Studies with a concentration in southern folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, cleaned houses for seven years, had a long run as an arts and education administrator at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and received my MA in English and Creative Writing from North Carolina State University. Meanwhile I published some short stories and poems and taught creative writing for the Duke Short Course Program and the Duke Writers Workshop. When my children went away to school, I began to think I might have the attention span to write a novel.

When I was forty, I met Congo, the gorilla my father fought in 1957 who turned out to be a boxing chimpanzee. There is a book written about Congo, The Gorilla Show. To-date, no book about my father.

I lived nineteen years of my life in the foothills of Virginia-Martinsville, Danville, Fieldale, and Bassett. I spent the next twenty-five years in North Carolina, mostly in Chapel Hill and Durham, with a short stint at Camp Lejeune and a year in Irmo, South Carolina. Then, on April Fool's Day 2000 I married the cowboy of my dreams and moved to middle Tennessee, where my husband encouraged me ride horses and to write full time. At the age of forty-nine, I became a grandmother and What Travels With Us, my first book of poems, was published by Louisiana State University Press. Sufficient Grace, my first novel, published by Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, debuts in June 2006, shortly after I turn fifty. It is such a thrill to have two books published, and in such short succession, but it pales in comparison to being happily married, a proud mother, and becoming a grandmother.

I love teaching creative writing to adults. Along with teaching at residential workshops, writers' conferences, and in university continuing studies programs, over the years I have held writing classes in a library, a cheese shop, the storage room of a bookstore, a lawyer's conference room, a bank board room, a student's living room, a court house, a student's dinning room, my own living room, a drug rehab center, and a café. In these less-than-conventional classrooms I have heard fantastic stories, true and not true, and have been privileged to read some excellent writing by folks who have always wanted to write, but who, like me, had to do some other things first.

I now live in Brush Creek, Tennessee with my ideal husband and our three horses, two goats, two cats, and five dogs, including a Great Pyrenees who thinks he's a lapdog and a gun-shy Walker Coonhound. And I am finally a cowgirl-sort of.