Sheila Seiler Lagrand lives with her husband Rich and their three dogs, J.D., Doc, Lollipop (aka "Poppy") in beautiful Trabuco Canyon, California. She enjoys serving at her church, Trabuco Canyon Community Church, gardening, cooking, and most of all, spending time with their children and nine (so far) grandchildren. She has lived her entire life in southern California, except for a year spent in French Polynesia as she conducted research for her dissertation. She doesn't understand boredom and is passionate about words, their power, their beauty, and their care and feeding.Sheila earned her doctorate in anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. As an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego, she studied anthropology and literature with an emphasis in writing. Sheila is a member of The High Calling. As a young woman she published poems in dozens of literary magazines. She has also contributed to anthropology journals and contributed a chapter to the book Fieldwork and Families: Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research.More recently, her work has appeared in Wounded Women of the Bible: Finding Hope When Life Hurts, Paul's Letter to the Philippians (BibleDude Community Commentary Series), and a few volumes of Chicken Soup for the Soul. She has work forthcoming in Soul Bare. Her Christmas tale, Yankee Doodle Christmas, is available as part of Kathi Macias' the Twelve Days of Christmas series. The characters from Yankee Doodle Christmas live on in Remembering for Ruth, a serial novel.