Gretchen Cassel Eick

Gretchen Cassel Eick/Gretchen Eick--pronounced "Ike"-- was a foreign and military policy lobbyist on Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C. and directed an interfaith lobby before becoming a professor of history. Her first book won 3 prizes, and she was awarded Fulbright Fellowships to Latvia, South Africa and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her passions include writing, traveling, collecting people and their stories, teaching history, and spending time with her family.

She and her husband, poet Michael J Poage, live half the year in Wichita, Kansas and half the year in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In both locations she teaches and writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and plays.

Eick is an eclectic writer. Her books range from scholarly studies to character-driven creative nonfiction, from the civil rights movement and Native American history to a futuristic novel set in Britain in 2025, to a novel about a man trapped in depression and overcome by his losses, to a creative imagining of a celebrated international crime bust in 1984 in Britain. Called "The White Tornado," she has written six books since 2013 when she started writing as a vocation .

Eick listens to what her characters tell her when they visit her while she sleeps, If they speak to you, she would love to hear what they tell you. Readers of her first novel, Maybe Crossings, asked for a sequel to follow the multiracial family into the present. She is working on that now.