Ever since she was in first grade, Michele Dunaway wanted to be a writer. Even later in life, she found herself writing, and served on Kirkwood High School's newspaper staff, her college paper, and a local music newspaper (which led to Michele's five-second appearance on MTV's "The Week in Rock"). "I've always wanted to write fiction and I published my first stories using my sister's manual typewriter," she said. "I wrote love stories, and married myself and my sister to the cutest boys in the neighborhood. My sister wrote westerns and killed everyone. We had a great time and I guess you can say that those first stories hooked me into wanting to write more ." Michele concentrated on her writing, even while getting her teaching degree. "While I earned my undergraduate degree in education, my master's degree is in media communication. In my spare time, apart from studying and teaching, my hobby has always been writing. I still have romance novels in the basement from when I was in high school and college. They're scrawled out in my handwriting, and written long before I knew anything about weaving plot, setting, and character. A teaching colleague Ed Washington read a Highlander fan fiction novel I wrote and told me I should try to seriously get published. So instead of it just being a dream, I set about trying to make it reality," she said. In 1988, Michele set a goal at her five-year high school reunion to be published by the year 2000. While she authored three professional journal articles, and compiled the Journalism Education Association Middle/Junior High Curriculum Guide, it wasn't until August of 1999 that Michele learned she had sold her first novel to Harlequin American Romance. "I'm thrilled that I accomplished this. Writing for Harlequin has always been a dream of mine, and words can't express the elation I felt when I heard they were buying my novel. I found out in the school office and the school nurse came running out because I was screaming with joy after I put down the phone," she said. Since then Michele has sold over 15 novels to Harlequin and her works have been translated into French, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Japanese among others. Describing herself as a woman who does too much but doesn't know how to stop, Michele also teaches high school English, advises the school yearbook, and raises two daughters and five spoiled housecats.
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