Barbara Ankrum

Barbara Ankrum grew up in Upstate New York, training to be a ballerina, but secretly dreamed of being an actress. She attributes this to all the Westerns she watched with her city cowboy father and her love of horses. Determined to make it in Hollywood, she moved there after college, where her degree in English Literature did little to help her land her parts. However, she built a career as a successful commercial actress, always on the lookout for a western that needed a ballerina-trained book hound who looked like everyone's next door neighbor. Many commercials later, she had two amazing children (now grown) with her sweet husband, and, in the downtime between auditions, she started writing. And writing. And writing. The first book she sold was a Western historical romance, and naturally, she cast herself as the lead-- in her imagination, of course. But she found that writing complex characters and adventurous stories about the West checked a long empty box for her. Once she sold her first book, she said farewell to Hollywood-Land and never looked back. She's written both historical and contemporary romances for such New York houses as Zebra/Kensington, Harper Collins and Harlequin/Silhouette and has recently ventured into the indie e-book market with both her backlist and brand new books. In between writing novels, she got her MFA in Creative Writing and optioned a few screenplays. A long-time writing instructor at the prestigious UCLA Extension Writer's Program, she still loves mentoring other writers. Barbara's emotional, character driven Western historicals (Wild Western Hearts and Wild Western Rogues Series), her sexy, Romantic Suspense for Harlequin and her heartwarming new, 'Montana Born' contemporaries for Tule Publishing, offer a little something for everyone. A #1 Bestseller on Amazon, Barbara's been honored twice with nominations for Romance Writers of America's prestigious RITA Award, and her books have won numerous other writing awards, including Romantic Times' K.I.S.S Awards and was a 2016 finalist in the Gayle Wilson Award of Excellence Contest. Today, she lives in Southern California with her husband, two rescue cats and a scruffy, adorable rescue dog who supervises every aspect of her writing day.