Betty J. Bady is a late bloomer fiction writer living in southern California. Unspoken Joy: an emotional journey is the first book of a trilogy in this series. She is also writing her autobiographical memoirs about her life growing up as: a burn survivor, a child in Jim Crow south, and a child of divorced parents. 

  Betty was born in 1951 and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. She was raised in segregated North Memphis together with her older sister by their father and step- mother. She attended both Woodstock and New Chicago Park elementary schools before attending Manassas High and eventually graduating from Northside High School.

  After graduating high school Betty was a struggling single mother of three children. She worked several minimum-wage jobs before deciding to go back to school to improve the quality of life for herself and her children. She graduated from Saginaw Valley State University and moved to Los Angeles where she earned a teaching credential from Cal State, Northridge. She taught for over 20 years before retiring in 2016.

  Betty never had any conscious aspirations of becoming a writer. She is a burn survivor and grew up with a lot of suppressed emotional trauma. The stories in her imagination were an escape from her grim reality and later became the inspiration for the stories that she writes today. As a child she remembers being impressed by the book Little Women, especially the sister who becomes ill and dies, and the love story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning because she was an invalid who found true love. 

  In an African American lit class in college, Betty discovered an array of African American writers of both genders who impressed her, but she became enamored in the female writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Nella Larson, Maya Angelou, and especially, Toni Morrison. Their work and accomplishments as well as that of Terry McMillan, whom she discovered later, were a critical influence in her decision to try writing.