Leila Meacham writes of East Texas with authority. She has lived in Texas all of her life with the exceptions short sojourns out of state with her Air Force husband and her birth in Minden, Louisiana, because her father could not get her mother across the border of the Sabine River into Texas for her to be born. She says that as far as she knows, it's the only regret he ever had of his daughter.Leila graduated from North Texas State University with a Bachelor's Degree of Arts. She married a pilot in the US Air Force during the war years of Viet Nam and served in numerous capacities of volunteer work as a military wife before resuming her teaching career in San Antonio. She taught high school English until her retirement from that profession, developing the gifted and talented program still used in the tenth grade curriculum of Converse Judson. She was twice elected by her peers as Teacher of the Year.She came to her love of writing late, she says, even though she dabbled briefly into the process when she wrote a romance novel in the mid-eighties that she never expected to be published. It was followed by two others because she was under contract, but the experience and genre left her with a desire never to pick up a pen again. "That changed when I ran out of things to do after retirement," she says, "and one day I sat down and wrote ROSES."Leila has no children and has been married to her husband for forty-three years.