Hi. I’m Jo Virden and I live in Arvada, Colorado with my husband, Bill. My journey into the realm of writing has been a rather circuitous voyage that began in high school, but was birthed in 1998. It was then that I met a most incredible 96-year-old woman named Ruth Marie Colville. I was almost 50 and in the midst of my thirty-seven year career in nursing. I ended up writing her biography, A Passion For Life: Ruth Marie Colville simply because it needed to be written. Along the way, Ruth Marie inspired me to explore my life choices and to understand that life is made up of multiple lives, each one leading to new adventures and new opportunities. My relationship with Ruth Marie gave me the courage, fifteen years later, to entertain the idea of writing stories based on authentic love letters. Those stories eventually melded into a novel, My Darling Dorothy. It will be published in June of this year (2016) and I look forward to sharing it with all of you. My life has taken me on many adventures in the time that has passed between these two books. I have traveled all over the United States and Europe and have observed first-hand the beautiful diversity that Ruth Marie so cherished. The last fifteen years of my nursing career I managed a Wound Healing Clinic. That experience taught me the importance of providing a holistic approach for our patients as part of their healing process. That same holistic approach has served me well in the way I live my life. Because of that approach, I have developed a passion for the enhancement of childhood literacy. Whether I am reading to preschoolers, tutoring a six-year-old, or supporting reading programs throughout the nation and the world, I feel I am making a difference, not only in the life of an individual child, but also in the world in general.