Garold Dane Hicks grew up in Willow Springs, Mo., a Howell County town of some 2,000 people located in the southern Missouri Ozarks. He graduated from Willow Springs High School in 1981, where he played football and ran track. A "B" student, he excelled in literature and writing classes, and with his classmates resurrected the school newspaper. After high school, Hicks went on to attend the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism, and got his first practical journalism experience reporting and writing for the weekly Willow Springs News during summers off from college. At the University, Hicks became involved with the campus Platoon Leaders Class in the United States Marine Corps, and in 1984 graduated from the USMC Officers Candidate School at Quantico, Va., with hopes of becoming a Marine aviator. He graduated from UMC in 1985, and turned down a Marine Corps commission to go into private business.

Hicks took a job as managing editor for two weekly newspapers in Garnett, Ks., in December 1985, and purchased the company in 1988. Since then Hicks has served as editor and publisher of The Eastern Kansas Senior Star, The Garnett Review, The Anderson Countian, and the present merged version of the previous two newspapers, The Anderson County Review. He has won numerous state press association editorial, column writing, and news reporting awards. He is currently the Southeast District Director for the Kansas Press Association, and holds a seat on the KPA board of directors.

While cutting his teeth on weekly newspapers and community journalism, Hicks said the people, events and stories he covered stuck in his mind as ample story lines and character development opportunities for fictional novels. Ever since reading Sir Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe" in a high school literature class, Hicks said he had the "affliction" to become a published novelist.

" As a journalist you watch people and the way their lives take ups and downs and turns and twists, and you watch the events play out and affect them," he said. "There's just so much opportunity there to experience the stories that affect people's lives, but the problem is that they're all reality – when you write a news story, you never get to choose the ending or put words in people's mouths that would make a more exciting story. Writing fiction allows you to cabbage on to those experiences and develop characters as composites of real people you've known, and craft the story in an exciting and meaningful way. Journalism is a fine and wonderful profession, but within it you're always limited by reality."

Hicks' writing credits include "The Skinning Tree," November 2003, and "A Whisper For Help," October 2001. He is the winner of six first-place honors in the Kansas Press Association Editorial and Personal Column Writing competitions, as has won other honors in news coverage and photography as well. In 1991, Hicks' newspaper won the coveted Boyd Community Service Award from KPA for the newspaper's service to its community.

Hicks lives on a small ranch in rural Anderson County, Kansas, with his wife Barb and two daughters, Callie and Carly.