Barbara Youree

Barbara Youree’s most recent book, France My Way, Adventures of a Solo Traveler, is an enticing memoir of her nine trips to France over four decades, where she stays in homes and pensions and deals with everything from being lost to escaping threatening experiences. Yet over-all the amazing welcoming of the French people wins out.

Courageous Journey is a narrative non-fiction with co-authors, Ayuel Leek Deng and Beny Ngor Chol, who are the subjects of this incredible story about children caught up in the atrocities of civil war in Sudan. The book was named a finalist in the National Best Books 2008 Awards, and President Jimmy Carter wrote one of the back cover endorsing blurbs.

She has written four historical romances, set in France and Italy, that have been combined under one cover: Renaissance Brides. She is also the author of six children’s books, numerous magazine articles, and a YA novel set in first-century Greece, Race to Glory, about the early Olympics.

Presently she is working on a historical novel, Flight of the Passerine Bird, set in sixteenth-century France during the War of Religions.

In addition to writing, Youree taught French and English on the secondary level. She enjoys art and has served as a docent at Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum and Bentonville, Arkansas' Crystal Bridges. She especially enjoys foreign travel, not only to France, but to a variety of countries such as Greece, Italy, Haiti, Guatemala, and Canada. Getting to know the people and culture is one of her greatest joys.