Author Bio
Judy Alexander was born in Washington D.C. in 1959, the oldest of six children. After her father completed his law degree at Georgetown University, he moved the family briefly to Mexico, then to Southern California.
Judy attended Lutheran schools from first through twelfth grades. Her fourth-grade teacher, Miss Jacobson, encouraged her writing by giving her writing assignments in poetry, song lyrics, and chapter books. Despite this writing encouragement, Judy didn’t consider writing a practical career and planned to be a lawyer like her father.
After graduating from high school, she spent a year as an exchange student in Finland and fell in love with her host family “brother” who became her husband three years later. She graduated from the University of California at Irvine with an undergraduate degree in social ecology and a master’s degree in business administration. Tired of being a student, Judy abandoned the idea of law school.
Despite her MBA, rather than searching for a corporate job, she went into self-employment, but failed at selling securities, running a wholesale bakery of Finnish whole-grain breads, and offering Finnish reflectors by mail order. Her marriage to her first husband ended painfully in divorce two years after the birth of her first son.
She eventually found entrepreneurial success, schedule flexibility, and creative satisfaction as a freelance marketing communications writer. A return to a church family and marriage to Gene Alexander brought her the love, acceptance, stability, and bravery to seriously try her hand at fiction writing.
For the past 10 years she has fit fiction writing into a life full with marriage, child rearing, client projects, and active church participation. Her secret is to rise very early in the morning and write for a couple of hours before the rest of the household wakes.
To polish her fiction writing skills, she has attended local community college writing courses, writing seminars (Santa Barbara, Squaw Valley, Festival of Faith and Writing), and peer critique groups. Local writers Jo-Ann Mapson and Earlene Fowler are her fiction-writing mentors.
To help with household expenses and finance the marketing of her fiction writing, Judy works part-time as a freelance marketing communications writer and photographer. Her hobbies are horseback riding, reading, gardening, walking, and watching movies and eating Thai food with her husband. She is the proud mother of two bright, talented boys, Erik, age 21, and Justin, 14.
Judy is a follower of the teachings of Jesus, as recorded in the Bible. She believes in the great love of God for all people.
Judy hopes to write novels that entertain and inspire.