Челли Кицмиллер

A California native, Chelley Kitzmiller lives and breathes the Wild West. She travels the West doing research, decorates her home with everything from a cowhide ottoman to a window valance of antique spurs and frames her own Western photography. She’s known and loved a host of Western movie stars such as Jack Palance, Harry Carey, Ronda Fleming and others. She says, “I’ve had quite a ride and the saddle ain’t even broke in yet.” As a teen, she hated history. The teacher was only interested in students memorizing names and dates; nothing about what motivated the people to do the things they did. Her favorite historical romance is Sweet Savage Love by Rosemary Rogers. When she read it, she didn’t know that the historical detail was factual and only later discovered the truth and realized that she’d gotten a painless dose of history. SSL was her life-changing experience; it made her want to pen her own historical romance and give to others what Rosemary had given her: history wrapped in an emotional action-packed story. In her pre-published years, Chelley founded the Orange County RWA Chapter, finaled in RWA’s Golden Heart Contest, organized the Amtrak Love Train (Google the film documentary Where The Heart Roams), organized writers’ conferences, wrote book reviews for Publishers Weekly and had her own book review columns in two major newspapers. After publishing four books with NAL and Harlequin, Chelley took a long break to help in her husband’s business, open two bookstores, work as an editorial assistant on nine books for Fern Michaels and one for Lauraine Snellng, learn photography and start a pet rescue. Through it all she wrote and still writes magazine and newspaper articles and grants for the pet rescue. These days she splits her time between writing, RVing and rescuing pets with her daughter, Gina