BUDDING NOVELISTS: Letha V. Crossman was born in 1898 near Blackwell, the eldest daughter in a family of twelve children, and grew up on a farm outside Waynoka. She became a teacher and first taught in one-room schoolhouse in Woods County in 1919. In the 1960s she began writing a novel based on her family's homesteading. Years later, her grandaughter rewrote the once rejected, shelved manuscript and had it published as an official 2007 Oklahoma Centennial work. Dana Baglee, born in 1943, grew up in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and attended Phillips University in Enid, Oklahoma.

Dana Jones Bagshaw grew up in Fort Smith, Arkansas; attended Phillips University in Enid, Oklahoma; and began her career as a writer in Silicon Valley, California where she received a degree from San Jose State University.

She lived in England for 18 years where her play CELL TALK about Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe from Medieval times won the Radius religious drama award in 2000 and is received its eighth production there in August 2011.

Dana currently resides in Santa Cruz, California where she enjoys singing with the locale chorale, walking, cycling, birding, and volunteering as a docent at Neary Lagoon.

Her first novel, MAMA GRACE, was published for the Oklahoma Centennial celebration in 2007. Now its sequel, RUNNING FROM GRACE, is available from FastPencil. She hopes to publish a third book, FACING GRACE.