About Me

I was born on Guam to a U. S. Navy Hospital Corpsman and his intrepid Hoosier wife, and I attended more than half a dozen schools before my high school graduation. My undergraduate degree is in journalism from the University of Illinois and my law degree from Georgetown University. 

It was only after a career on Capitol Hill as an aide to the late Congressman Charlie Wilson (“Charlie Wilson’s War”) and as a lobbyist with my husband that I “discovered” my true intellectual passion. Returning to school in 2006, I earned a Masters degree in history, with a concentration in military history, from George Washington University. 

My first book, Lincoln's Generals' Wives: Four Women Who Influenced the Civil War for Better and for Worse (Kent State University Press, 2016), won three national awards. Delivered Under Fire: Absalom Markland and Freedom's Mail (Potomac Books, 2023) has garnered praise from a wide range of readers and awards for history and biography..

The New York Times, The Journal of Military History, and The Michigan War Studies Review have published my work in the past, and I've had the privilege of speaking at the annual conferences of the Society for Military History and the Society for Civil War Historians, and at the U. S. Naval Academy. 

I am a member of the Ulysses S. and Julia D. Grant Historical Home Advisory Board in Detroit, Michigan. I've served on the Board of Directors of President Lincoln’s Cottage, and on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Journal of Military History. In 2023, I received two honors which I cherish. Gov. Andy Beshear commissioned me a Kentucky Colonel (like Absalom Markland), and the Johann Fust Library Foundation appointed me to its Literary Advisory Board. I also write poetry which - to my astonishment -  has been published in prominent journals and awarded honors. 

My husband Lindsay and I spend half the year in Boca Grande, Florida, and the other half in the shadow of the Teton Mountains, in Lindsay’s home state of Wyoming.