Laura L. Valenti has been a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers for nearly 40 years and a novelist for the past decade. A former resident of El Salvador, she has been a volunteer mission worker in several Latin American countries and in and out of the region since childhood. While Las Palomitas is a work of fiction, it is one borne of her passion for the people of El Salvador and the Latin culture that has permeated her entire life. Always interested in Latin America, she has spent the past four decades in another small paradise, living, learning and writing about the people of the Ozarks, including seven popular regional novels. She has held a variety of jobs over the years including horse wrangler and trail guide, bi-lingual clerk and office administrator, law enforcement office manager, county jail administrator, and working board member and off site manager of a women's Christian half-way house as well as novelist and local writer. She and her husband, Warren raised four children and have several grandsons in Missouri and Texas. They remain sequestered in the Ozark hills, another picturesque fishing sanctuary, far from much of the madness that is the modern world.