Ramona K. Cecil is a Christian, wife, mother, grandmother, poet, and award-winning author of historical romance novels for the Christian market. She and her husband of 47 years are the parents and grandparents of two daughters and three grandchildren. They make their home in Seymour, Indiana, the “small town” made famous by rocker John Mellencamp’s song of the same name. A lifelong lover of history, especially Indiana history, she sets the majority of her stories in the Hoosier state. When not writing, her hobbies include reading, gardening, and visiting places of historical interest.
Ramona has been writing creatively since about the age of four when she began composing poetry. Both her parents had dabbled in writing poetry and her mother wrote two unpublished novels. The middle child of three, Ramona Kathleen—nicknamed Kathy—was the only one of her siblings to get the writing bug. Growing up in rural southern Indiana, she found plenty of inspiration for her nature and Christian focused poetry. Over her growing-up years she entered her poetry in various contests with modest success.
Author seated, with sister Jane Ellen
Between the mid 1980s and 1990s over eighty of her Christian verses were purchased by a leading publisher of Christian gift items. She still gets emails from fans of those verses. Since about 2000, she began focusing on writing historical romance novels and novellas for the Christian market. Her stories are set in the 1800s and early 1900s. Larkspur, her first attempt at writing a historical romance novel, was inspired by the living history museum Connor Prairie in Fishers, Indiana. That book was published in 2006 as a result of winning first place in a contest sponsored by a publishing company. Since then she’s had fourteen more traditionally published novels and novellas.
She says, “When I’m working on a project I set a goal of 1000 words a day. I always pray for guidance before I begin writing and I finish my prayer with ‘Dear Lord, give me this day my daily thousand words.’”
