Ann Gross Patterson grew up in Garvin County, Oklahoma, and attended Paoli schools before moving to Modesto, California in 1951. The first person in her generations of family to graduate from college, Ann graduated from Fresno State University in 1960. She taught eighth grade "Creative Writing" in Ceres, California, in 1960 and taught in other schools in California and Idaho. She served as an executive and a grant writer for numerous nonprofit charitable organizations in Idaho and Oregon before retiring in Portland, Oregon, where she began to write. All her life after college, Ann said "someda...