Janet was born and raised in upstate New York and as a child and adult has many times visited the farm her father’s family homesteaded in South Dakota six generations ago. After an Anthropology degree from New York University, she joined VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and worked for a year on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, which extends into both North and South Dakota and was the main relocation site for most of the Sioux combatants in the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Following this memorable experience, she received a BS in Nursing from Alaska Methodist University. Then back in the “lower 48” Janet worked as a nurse, primarily at the Norwest Day Center for Adults in Seattle. In 2001 she and her husband embarked on a nine year adventure as full time RVers and explored America. Then in 2005, Janet's father suffered a stroke and asked her to finish a novel, IRINA, which was half finished and a sequel to his first novel, THE GOOD NEIGHBORS. THE GOOD NEIGHBORS is a work of historical fiction set in Depression era South Dakota, and loosely based on some of her father's memories of that time and place. IRINA continues the saga of a Romanian family who have immigrated to America in search of the American Dream of freedom and land of their own, and is about the last member of the Dacia family who must flee Romania and of her South Dakota family's struggle to get to New York to save her. Janet so enjoyed the writing and research process, that she wrote a third novel, DEBTS AND VENGEANCE, which ties up loose ends from IRINA, and further develops the characters from the first two novels. The three books have now become The Good Neighbors Trilogy and Janet has revised and illustrated all three. Janet and her husband now live in the San Juan Islands in her late parents' home, where she is studying water color painting, Astrology and mentally planning two more books about the Dacia family.