J. Roylance Kraske

J. Roylance Kraske was born and raised in the Mountain West and now makes her home in the Puget Sound area. She earned a Bachelor’s Degree in English with the intent to teach high school, but got sidetracked with other jobs. A widow with one grown son, she spends as much time working in her yard as she does writing.

Sent out of a high school science class when she was caught writing a mystery novel, she has keep that story as her personal sample of a work sorely needing a complete rewrite. Her early stories and first novel were written in pencil on yellow tablet paper, followed by rewrites on white paper. She has only recently begun using a computer for most of her writing.

Her characters come from all sorts of places: others waiting with her in a grocery store line, a bus boy clearing tables, a bald man standing on a corner with a cell phone to his ear. Stories told by others get woven into her books.

While employed to run a freshman composition writing lab in Utah State University, she wrote dozens of short stories. Four of these stories were published locally in Utah Holiday, Mountain West, and Valley magazines in the late 1970’s.

After a thirty-year hiatus while working at various positions at a community college, she is now getting on paper the literary and romance novels that have populated her mind for years. She hopes her stories provide others insight into the sometimes humorous condition of being human.