Lanita Bradley Boyd

I enjoy my roles as wife, mother, grandmother, teacher, speaker, writer, daughter, sister, niece, aunt, and friend.

I grew up near Portland, Tennessee, taught elementary school for 34 years, and have been a minister's wife for 46 years. We have two married children and three wonderful [isn't that the accepted adjective here?]grandchildren.

I have always been a writer, though my beginning efforts prompted me not to plan on writing as a career. I started my first book at age 14 and ran out of anything to say after four handwritten pages. Hmmmm....maybe I won't be the modern Louisa May Alcott after all, I thought.

A ministry I enjoy is writing devotionals. I write for "Power for Today,* *The Upper Room,* *The Quiet Hour,* *Devotions,* and others. I like to find a verse that connects me to a personal experience I can write about, but I also enjoy the challenge of getting assignments to write something with impact in 200 words on a specific passage of scripture.

My first published book was in 1985 for Loyola Press, a workbook for third-graders, called *Writing Step by Step.* I was asked to condense the writing process to steps that could be followed by those not trained in writing process. What a challenge! A workbook for writing process? But somehow it worked, and those books were used in parochial schools for years.