Sylvia Dickey Smith's roots are buried in the land of pirates, cowboys, Cajuns and Paleo-Indians.  She grew up in the 40's and 50's in the southeast Texas town of Orange, the last "get off" of I-10 before Louisiana. 

In the seventies she moved to Trinidad, West Indies with her husband and children and lived and worked there for six years. There she developed a love for other cultures, races and religions.

She graduated with a B.A. in Sociology and a
M.Ed in Educational Psychology at mid-life,
from the University of Texas at El Paso. In her
Freshman English class her professor encouraged her to develop her gift of writing.  But lack of confidence and other personal struggles led her down another path. The drive to write haunted her dreams. Ideas for fiction and non-fiction alike turned into a tall stack of spiral notebooks tucked away in a drawer.

From her earliest memories, Sylvia had a deep spiritual base. Her father
died when she was middle-aged and she entered a spiritual wilderness-wandering which led her to study ancient religions. She is particularly drawn
to feminist and metaphorical theology. Study of Jungian psychology, mythology, and cultural anthropology matured her spiritual nature. As a licensed psychotherapist she brings an innate sense of human nature to her communication skills.

In addition, she has served as a consultant and curriculum advisor for
Thinkwell.com, Austin, Texas revising their sociology curricula, she was the
regional Director of Operations for the long term care facilities of American
Habilitation Services in Austin, San Marcos, San Antonio, Seguin and Corpus Christi. She also served as the Director of Industrial Operations for an employment and training center for adults with barriers to employment (mental, physical, emotional and educational). Sylvia consulted for the Texas Workforce Commission as a Rapid Response Specialist, providing management services to large companies.

As the owner and director of InterActions El Paso Texas, she founded and
conducted leadership development, individual, family, and marriage counseling,
and facilitated therapy groups for sexual offenders on parole, adult survivors of incest/sexual abuse, and assertiveness training for women.

Sylvia now lives in Round Rock, Texas with her husband, Bill, a retired Army Colonel. She is the proud mother of four children, all grown and gone, and excellent writers themselves. She is the grandmother of lots of delightful, energetic grandchildren scattered around the country. She writes in a bedroom lined with books and papers and CD drives. When guests come, she vacates her writing room and sleeps late, rather than getting up before dawn to write. When she isn't writing, she gardens, reads, cares for an ailing mother and allows herself to simply be.
 

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