Barbara Mullen

Barbara Mullen was born and grew up in Marquette, a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She graduated from Northern Michigan University with a bachelor's degree in sociology and spent four years in the United States Foreign Service in Southeast Asia and Japan.

In 1960, she married William Mullen, a Marine Corps Captain. They had two young sons, Sean and Terence, when Captain Mullen's plane was shot down in 1966 during the Vietnam War. In 1970, she founded Families For Immediate Release, a national POW/MIA wives organization that lobbied to end the war. William Mullen remains missing in action to this day.

Barbara earned a master's degree in creative writing from Lesley College in 1985 and since then has published three books, EVERY EFFORT, St. Martin's Press, WHEN YOU MARRY A MAN WITH CHILDREN, Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster and DOMINIC'S DAUGHTER, Wheatmark Publishers. Her freelance articles have appeared in The Boston Herald, The Cape Cod Times and Sojourner.

She now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area near her two sons, Sean and Terry, and their families. Barbara has four grandsons, William, Christopher, Edward and Fynnigan.