JoDee Neathery

JoDee was born in Southern California moving to Midland, Texas at the age of five – a wonderful place to grow up full of dreamers and doers and the friendliest people on the planet. After graduating high school, her eyes were on attending a small liberal arts college in Louisiana majoring in dance with aspirations of a Broadway career. Her beloved daddy filed that pipedream away suggesting that unless she was going to be a nurse or teacher, finding a job was a better option. She began her professional career in the banking industry prior to branching into public relations executive recruiting for Dallas and New York agencies.

Relocating to East Texas offered more opportunity to write, handling public relations for a non-profit, writing freelance articles for the newspaper, trade publications and newsletters. JoDee enjoys a byline, Back Porch Musings, a light-hearted view of life in general, in an area newspaper.

Her dream “job” has been chairing and writing minutes and reviews for the community book club, Bookers, for eighteen years and it was those members that championed her novel writing journey. “They believed in me before I did and I’m forever beholden to them for standing at the finish line with pom-poms waving as publication became a reality.” Backflip moments further fueling the fire came in the form of comments from two renowned authors on reviews she published of their novels. Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Olive Kitteridge wrote, “This is one of the most wonderful things I have seen! I laughed out loud reading it and I will keep it and cherish it forever. What a piece of writing it is.”  Catherine Ryan Hyde, the award-winning author of over thirty novels, said of Don’t Let Me Go, “This is quite an amazing piece of writing!”

JoDee and her husband live in close proximity to their only daughter, son-in-law, two teenage grandsons, a bird dog, four cats, a donkey and a few head of cattle.