Blog Me, Baby

Forecast for St. Peters, MO: Thunderstorms, high 90 degrees.

Each month I feature one or two personal writing friends I want to introduce so others might become acquainted with them, their works and their websites. My two picks for August are Dianna Graveman and Joy Wooderson. Both women are members of Saturday Writers, and I've known Dianna for about seven years and Joy for about five years. In addition to being great writers, they are also good and generous friends.

Dianna Graveman is an editor, a writer, and a teacher. Her fiction and nonfiction stories and articles have awards from the Missouri Writers Guild Awards and the Catholic Press Association Awards, as well as recognition from Whispering Prairie Press, Women on Writing, ByLine Magazine, Adams Media, and other groups. Dianna co-authored of one pictorial history for Arcadia Publishing ("Images of America" series) and is currently under contract to develop three more for release in 2010. Dianna is very generous with her time and talent. She frequently sends me requests for submissions and contest alerts to post on my blog.

Joy Wooderson was born in Durban, South Africa, the eldest in the fourth generation of a prominent ministerial family. At age twenty-one she set off alone for Toronto, Canada. In 1971 she emigrated to the U.S. and settled in Atlanta, Georgia—where she worked for Delta Air Lines as a writer in their customer service area. In 2004 she decided to try another part of the country and moved to St. Louis, Missouri. To her delight, she found Saturday Writers, a chapter of the Missouri Writers’ Guild. Joy is an award-winning writer whose essays have been published in numerous anthologies. For several years she served as the Membership Chair for Saturday Writers, where she was the smiling face at the welcome table for our meetings. Click on the link above to her website to learn more about Joy or her book, Finding Joy: One Woman's Journey Back to Faith.