Alice Liles

After teaching a variety of reading and literature subjects at the secondary level, coaching at the junior high level for thirty-one years in the Texas towns of Edna and Muleshoe, and serving as state president of Texas Classroom Teachers Association, I retired in 2004.

Then I discovered blogs. I would have loved to write a great American novel like the ones I had my students read, but it just wasn't in me. But writing blog stories about people, places, local history, adventures, animals, and my family, well, that I could do, and do well. First came The Bright Lights of Muleshoe. Later I added another blog, Cactus are Cool, about the cactus and succulents I grow. Then I decided that many of those stories needed to be preserved for history, so I gathered fifty-one of them for a book also called The Bright Lights of Muleshoe. The book was deemed historically accurate and worthy of shelf space in the Texas Tech University Southwest Collections/Special Collections Library on the campus in Lubbock and in the Center for the Book at the Texas State Library in Austin.

My stories also appear in the local newspaper, The Muleshoe Journal. I still live in Muleshoe with my husband, four cats, two dogs, and a yard full of cactus and succulents. New stories for both blogs can still be found at www.aliceliles.com .