Lanaia Lee was born in 1957 to a Navy father and a schoolteacher
mother who home-schooled her. When she was nine years old, her mother died from a massive
stroke. Because her father was rarely home, her grandmother, a professed
black witch, gained custody. When Lanaia was 14, her grandmotherabandoned her, and she landed in foster care where she had four different sets of foster parents within a year.
At age fifteen, she went to boarding school on her dad's GI Bill. She graduated in her junior year after which she drifted, living with various people but without a family or a home.
At eighteen, she married, suffered three miscarriages and divorced. By nineteen, she began working in management for convenient stores and restaurant chains.
She remarried at age 30 and had a stillborn daughter the following year. Five years later, her husband left her for a seventeen-year-old. She filed bankruptcy, and one month later suffered a massive stroke, after which she spent seven months in the hospital and remains in a wheelchair.
For the next two years she underwent intensive physical therapy, but she would never walk again. She took the step of finding work to help her rehabilitation. She found employment at vocational trade school where she met her soul mate, David, also in a wheelchair from a motorcycle wreck he sustained in 1984. They have been married since 1992.
They, too, lost two children due to her disease, erratic hypertension. She and her husband
live independently, and she still drives.
In 2001, David dared her to write a poem. Out of curiosity, she posted it in an
online poetry forum. The feedback was so positive, she kept writing. At first, she
wrote just poems, then short stories and finally novels. All of her work is typed
with one hand because of her disabilities.
Lanaia gives credit to the grace of God, which has helped her overcome immense adversity, and she claims she won’t quit until she hits the bestseller list.