Toni Kief

I’m from a small Midwestern town, Pekin, Illinois, and a family of high spirits and laughter. My entire life Father claimed he named me after a stripper in the 1940s. I’ve caught buses and moved west, south and finally settled in a smaller town in Washington state. I am constantly amazed by the mountains and trees. My story includes decades in insurance as one of the first women outside casualty investigators in Florida. Also, a longtime civil rights activist with an FBI file. At sixty years old, a friend dared me to write. We wrote a cookbook based on women from history and myth, Dangerous Dishes and the Food the Inspire. It hasn’t been published. Soon after I joined a writer’s group that specialized in flash fiction, which developed into novels. I have coined my genre as OA which is Old Adult, couldn’t let those YAs get all the attention. Retired, I now have 7 books published. I’m a co-founder of The Writers Cooperative of the Pacific Northwest and in this time of pandemic, I’ve been walking the cemetery looking for plots. (Oh, and picking up trash – I can’t ignore it.