About the Authors

CATHY LAGROW first fell in love with books as a young girl, when she often chose to lose herself in a story rather than play outside. That love has never waned. She estimates that she’s read more than two thousand books, and she habitually collects new titles much faster than she can read them.

Her previous writing endeavors include her blog, Windows and Paper Walls; a story for Chicken Soup for the Soul titled “A Good Mother”; and a weekly column for All the Church Ladies on a website created by journalist Karen Spears Zacharias.

In 2006, just after the birth of her first baby, Cathy and her family learned the secret her grandmother Minka Disbrow had been carrying for almost eighty years —that at age seventeen, she’d given up a baby for adoption. Cathy’s mother, Dianna, is Minka’s second child, born nearly eighteen years later. Cathy began working on The Waiting in early 2012.

Cathy has been married to her high school sweetheart, Dan, for almost twenty-five years. She is a licensed, nonpracticing US Customs broker and a piano teacher. She lives in Oregon, where she’s often found in the kitchen baking or curled up in a chair reading. An avid runner, she sometimes runs literal circles around her two small boys at the neighborhood park. Nearly everything fascinates her.

This is Cathy’s debut book.

CINDY COLOMA is a national bestselling author who has written twelve novels, including: Beautiful (2010 Christy Award finalist for Young Adults and 2011 Revolve Young Adult Tour featured book); The Salt Garden (one of Library Journal’s best genre books in 2004); Song of the Brokenhearted (2013 ECPA bestseller with coauthor Sheila Walsh); Orchid House (2008 ECPA bestseller); and Winter Passing (2001 Christy Award finalist and Romantic Times Top Pick).

Cindy has collaborated on fiction projects with bestselling author, singer, and speaker Sheila Walsh, and as a ghostwriter with a former federal prosecutor and TV legal-news analyst.

Her nonfiction projects include collaborations on memoirs such as The Waiting (May 2014, Tyndale Momentum) and It’s a Wild Life: How My Life Became a Zoo (June 2014, Medallion Press), a book about an exotic animal zoo in Michigan, and the Nat Geo Wild television program. Cindy developed and wrote the nonfiction book Renting Lacy: A Story of America’s Prostituted Children (coauthored with former Congresswoman Linda Smith) and has also written over one hundred published articles.

Cindy is a speaker, book doctor, and writing coach. She’s spoken at such events and conferences as the World Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany; Simpson University Faculty Retreat; LittWorld in Tagaytay, Philippines; and many others. In her local area, she has co-led a writers’ group for sixteen years.

With five children ranging in age from their early twenties to a baby boy, Cindy’s life is always full of laughter, joy, and toys to trip over. She can’t own enough books or watch enough movies, has more travel dreams than possible for a human (including underwater and outer-space itineraries), but loves home best of all. She and her extended family have lived in the Redding, California, area for over thirty-five years.