India was born in southwestern Arkansas more than a century after her ancestors settled there in the 1830s. She became a Border Patrol Brat at the age of three and spent her childhood and adolescence following her father’s law enforcement career across Texas and California. Upon graduating from college, she took to heart the advice, “If you can’t stand the heat and humidity, get out of the South,” and relocated to Wyoming where she’s spent over four and a half decades. She has mapped prairie dog towns, located raptor nests, enumerated frogs, trolled rivers in search of Colorado cutthroat trout, performed pre-mining vegetative surveys, studied rattlesnakes, and worked as a wildlife museum naturalist. She spent ten years as a first responder for the sheriff’s office’s victim response unit and several decades teaching subjects that ranged from row crop technology to Middle Eastern dance.
India can operate a scraper, a sewing machine, a motorcycle, and a variety of looms, but can’t decorate a cake without getting crumbs in the icing. Each summer she battles mule deer and sawfly larvae for control of her rose garden, some years with better luck than others. She’s perfectly happy on solo cross-country road trips, doesn’t mind flying, but requires medication, mediation, and/or handholding to navigate her way through the airport to the loading gate. She has rappelled off cliffs, crawled through caves, and hiked in bear country. Don’t mention traffic circles to her. She’s lucky she isn’t still circling the one outside Inverness, Scotland.
She and her husband, Roy, have been happily married since 1981 even though India inadvertently set the wedding on the opening day of antelope season. They raised two children who rebelled against their hippie parents by never touching weed or reading Herman Hesse. Each child has produced one perfect grandchild.
India’s short story collection won the 2023 Neltje Blanchan Memorial Writing Award for best work inspired by nature. She wrote two books on embroidery and received multiple grants from Embroiderer’s Guild of America, Wyoming Arts Council, and National Endowment for the Arts to study and develop courses in Yemenite Jewish embroidery. Her short stories and feature articles have appeared in local, regional, and national publications. For nine years, she wrote a nationally distributed quarterly wildlife newsletter called The Howl. The Song of the Blue Bottle Tree is her debut novel.