Sherrill Nilson used to raise horses. Now she writes about flying horses--with hawk heads and wicked talons.

Author of the Adalta Series, she's been a cattle rancher, horse breeder, environmentalist, mother of three, traveler to exotic places-even a tarot card reader. She's lived in Santa Fe and Ruidoso, NM, San Francisco, and Austin after leaving the hills of Eastern Oklahoma and her ranch.

She has a Ph.D. in East-West Psychology, and those studies opened her to the world of ancient myth and story. The rigor of writing so many papers and her dissertation suited her. She loves science fiction and fantasy and is a prolific reader.

One day she put the book she just finished down and thought, "I'm going to run out of books to read. I love imagined worlds. Maybe I could create my own." So she took a leap of faith and embarked on writing Karda and Hunter-the first two books in the Adalta series. She's now working on Falling, the third book, and lurking in the back of her mind is another series about the trees deciding whether or not to leave earth.

She lives, writes, and reads SciFi/fantasy in Tulsa, Oklahoma--back where she started as the oldest of seven kids (don't ask to drive), three of whom are writers who love telling each other how they should write. "Sometimes," she says, "They're mean to me and use too much red ink."

She doesn't have a dog, a cat, or even a bird, but she does have an old Volvo convertible and loves to drive around with the wind blowing her hair. It's how she gets her vitamin D.