Shelley Bates

Whether typing search warrants and making undercover phone calls for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or editing marketing material for the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley, Shelley Bates has found that everyone has a story. Most people have stopped telling her theirs in case she puts them in her books. Shelley has a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an M.A. in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania. She sold her master's thesis to Harlequin after she graduated in 2002, and it subsequently became a double finalist in the 2004 National Readers Choice Awards. Grounds to Believe, her debut novel from Steeple Hill Books and the first book in her Elect Trilogy, won the prestigious RITA Award for Best Inspirational Novel of the year from the Romance Writers of America in 2005. The second book in the trilogy, Pocketful of Pearls, is an August 2005 release from Warner Faith, and the last book, A Sounding Brass, will be out in August 2006. She's a freelance editor in the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley, where there is plenty of scope for fiction. Between books, Shelley enjoys playing the piano and Celtic harp, making historical costumes, and spoiling her chickens rotten.