Biography
Lou Dean is the author of countless articles in major magazines, an anthology of western women, five books of memoir, two young-adult novels and a new contemporary western romance novel. She received a 1995 Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Award for life stories with her first memoir "Angels in Disguise, has four Colorado Authors League Awards, a Colorado Blue Spruce Nomination and a prestigious Western Heritage Award for her work.
After Lou Dean''s mama left the Oklahoma farm in 1955, a very caring teacher enrolled Shorty Dog in school so he could comfort his young friend. Four decades later, a dog named Jake saved Lou from a life threatening ATV accident, which led to her first book. Her latest memoir, "The Amazing Grace of Dogs,"is the unforgettable story of how love from dedicated canine companions gave Lou the strength to survive family tragedy and the unmerited divine assistance (grace) to become an award-winning author. She says it was no accident that her first published article in 1973 "The Decision" was about her beloved childhood dog, Shorty.
Lou is a regular contributor to Guideposts Magazine. Many of her inspirational articles are drawn from surviving personal heartache. Lou and her three siblings were raised by their father in Osage County, Oklahoma (fourteen miles from Fairfax, OK (the location of the recent film, "Killers of the Flower Moon.") Lou's mother abandoned the family, which resulted in a chaos of laughter and tears that has provided the background for three early memoirs including: "Angels in Disguise," "Paw Prints in my Soul" and "Osage County Kids,"
About her newly released (October 2023) contemporary, western romance, "Autumn of the Big Snow," Lou says, "I moved to Colorado because my son had chronic asthma. I had to get him to a high, dry climate. After only a few months, Scott's health began to improve. Homesickness for Oklahoma choked me that first year, but slowly, I adapted to the high desert foothills of northwest Colorado. My love for this country became the setting for this novel and my years of working summer construction jobs to support my writing habit, inspired the plot."