Barbara Samuel

When she was 15, Barbara Samuel wrote in her diary that she wanted to "write books, see the world, and be happy." She's delighted to be still working on all three.

The beloved romance and women's fiction writer has won the highly prestigious RITA award from Romance Writers of America 7 times and has been recently inducted into the RWA Hall of Fame. In the tradition of Kristin Hannah, Susan Wiggs, Maeve Binchy, and Barbara Freethy, she writes a highly emotional stories about families, food, dogs, and love. Many of her novels include recipes, and she has been known to cook in response to any stressful situation, learning that cooking is like life--sometimes things go wrong, but if you keep trying, eventually you'll get it right.

She also writes as Barbara O'Neal for Bantam books, where she has penned the award-winning The Lost Recipe For Happiness and How To Bake A Perfect Life, which was a Target Book Club Pick in 2011. She also wrote five titles of romantic women's fiction for Ballantine Books, including No Place Like Home, The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue and Lady Luck's Map of Vegas. Her books have been translated into many languages and published widely around the world, including France, England, Poland, Australia, Italy, Germany, Brazil, and many others.

Barbara lives in the stunningly beautiful city of Colorado Springs with her beloved, a British endurance athlete who vows he'll never loose his accent, and a houseful of rescue animals, including a pair of tuxedo sibling cats, a muscular cross-eyed lilac-point Siamese (found wandering! Really!) and a chow-newfoundland mix who knows he is the most gloriously beautiful dog on earth, because he is told this is true many times a day. She loves gardening, even if gardens and mountain living are an uneasy mix, hiking, Zumba, reading and reading and reading, and loves travel partly because it gives her more time to stick her nose in a book. She's managed to make it to eight countries so far, and hundreds of cities, but hopes to get that number a LOT higher.

She loves to talk with readers. Find her around the web in these avenues:

Websites: http://barbarasamuel.com and http://barbaraoneal.com
Blog: http://awriterafoot.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BarbaraSamuelONeal
Twitter: https://twitter.com/barbaraoneal
The Goddess Blogs: http://thegoddessblogs.com