STAFF

Charity lives in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area of Minnesota, with her husband, Bob, and son, Andrew, along with assorted dogs, cats, and fish. She grew up in the small southern Minnesota town of Mankato. Like another native Mankato writer, Maud Hart Lovelace, she knew at age five that she wanted to write.

Writing didn't seem very practical so she decided to pursue other career options. After majoring in Russian at the University of Wisconsin, she joined the Army. For five years, she jumped out of airplanes, lived in Germany, deployed to Desert Storm, and married a dashing Artillery officer.

But writing was never far away--she wrote intelligence summaries, maintenance procedures, operations orders, along with an intelligence report she no longer has the security clearance to read. When she left the Army, her first civilian job was as a documentation specialist (i.e., writer). She now works as a contract technical writer for a pacemaker company in St. Paul.

Her first published short story appeared in the April 2000 issue of Futures Magazine. She has two other stories due out this year, including one that placed third in Future's Fire to Fly contest. She has a short nonfiction piece in a forthcoming issue of ByLine Magazine, and placed first in the 1999 California Writer's Club short fiction contest.