Iowa native Jo Kline Cebuhar is a graduate of Iowa State University (1973) and Drake Law School (1984).  Her career as an entrepreneur focused on tax and real estate law, but it was Jo’s personal journey that ignited a passion for writing about death and dying. Through a series of losses, beginning with widowhood at age twenty-eight, Jo came to fully appreciate America’s dysfunctional relationship with life’s end. It was after serving as volunteer chair of Iowa's largest hospice that she began to write nonfiction books about end-of-life legal issues and the meaning of legacy.

Meanwhile, Jo observed her friends—and 76,000,000 other Baby Boomers—dread, then struggle with, some of life’s most daunting challenges: aging, the death of loved ones and, ultimately, their own mortality.  As a long-time student of American demographics, Jo knows that forty-four percent of the 2.5 million Americans who die each year will do so under hospice care and she searched for a way to demystify the issues surrounding death and dying for her readers. Once the characters of her first work of fiction, EXIT-A novel about dying, materialized—everyday folks who have discovered the bittersweet privilege of bearing witness to death and have accepted the grace that can come from being left behind—her search was over. 

Jo lives in West Des Moines, Iowa with her husband John and two cats.