Meet Judith
The youngest child of a Midwestern couple, Judith was born and raised in the small rural town of North Branch, New Jersey. She married at eighteen and after eleven years was divorced. As a single mom with three children she opened her own business, a beauty salon, to make ends meet. While running the salon she found a second job at the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey as a laboratory assistant.
All of this time, her real love was nursing and, on her own, Judith put herself through college, obtaining an associates degree in nursing from Somerset Community College while continuing to work her other three jobs; mother, salon owner, and lab tech. Nine years later she remarried, passed her nursing boards, and embarked on a career in nursing in Albany, NY, while her new husband attended medical school. She continued her studies during that time and received her BS degree from Graceland College.
Judith has been a registered nurse for over twenty years, working with medical, surgical, and dialysis clients, and then, as a civilian nurse at an Army research facility, handling special immunizations for the military and civilian research staff. She has a special interest in renal failure clients when at the tender age of two her husband’s niece became one of the first children at Albany Medical Center to be put on peritoneal dialysis due to renal failure.
The military and more precisely war has been the backdrop of Judith’s life. As a civilian nurse Judith had the honor to serve the military at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Her brother served in Japan after the Korean War. Judith’s husband, Frank, served with the U. S. Army for seven years as a physician and during the first Gulf War. The Vietnam War took high school friends and extended family & debilitated others (PTSD and injuries). Some of these brave men lost their lives, others lost their souls. Now she has two grand nephews, one in the Marines, the other in the Army, who have just returned from their first tours in Afghanistan.
These proud, capable young men, like all of our military, are always in her prayers.
As a mother, as a single mom, as the wife of someone in the military, as a caring nurse, and as a person who has felt the pain of separation from a loved one during a time of war, Judith has pulled out all of those emotions and experiences and released them into her writing.
Judith is blessed to have been allowed into the lives of the many soldiers, civilians serving for the military, patients, and family who were kind enough to share their stories. Judith is an avid reader and a natural storyteller. She feels the best stories are those based on real people living and struggling through this life one chapter at a time.
Judith now makes writing her full time career and divides her time between her homes in New Hampshire and North Carolina.