ABOUT THE AUTHOR[ Author Photo ]Denise Lee grew up in Southern California before her family moved to Colorado, Wyoming, and eventually the Missouri-Arkansas border, where she graduated high school from Cooter, Missouri, in 1987. She went on to study Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Housing Design at the University of Missouri in Columbia. It was during her time at Mizzou that she first began confronting the childhood trauma she had carried in silence for years - a reckoning that would ultimately shape both her life and her writing.After surviving an abusive marriage, Denise rebuilt her life from the ground up - rediscovering her identity, her faith, and her capacity for love. That journey, from brokenness to wholeness, became the foundation for Onward and Upward, a book she wrote not as a clinical guide but as an honest, hand-on-your-shoulder account of what it actually takes to start over. She writes with the hard-won authority of someone who has lived every word.Denise is a multi-genre author whose work spans memoir, supernatural fiction, and mystery. She is the creator of the Descendants of the Bloodstone series, the Derek Campbell Detective series, the Witching series, and the Souls of the Cube series. Her professional background includes executive leadership roles in hospitality and chamber of commerce advocacy, and she has served as an expert panelist at regional conferences. She brings the same tenacity to her writing that she brings to everything else in her life.Denise lives in the South Carolina Lowcountry with her husband, Steven. She remains a lifelong lover of horses, books, and the belief that it is never too late to become the person you were always meant to be.