Joyce Scarbrough

Ms. Scarbrough was born in Chickasaw, Alabama, and was the valedictorian of her graduating class at Vigor High School in 1980. She is the mother of three intellectually gifted children and has been married for twenty years to Tony Scarbrough--a public school teacher, coach and the love of her life. Ms. Scarbrough and her family reside in Semmes, Alabama.

Joyce has always loved reading and had a tireless imagination that prompted her to constantly invent stories for her own entertainment or as a game for her friends to enact. She loved Barbies and paper dolls because she would use them as characters in the endless tableaus she would create for them to perform.

She wrote a play in the seventh grade that was performed for the eighth grade classes (a very discriminating audience) and that's when she got her first taste of positive feedback and became hopelessly addicted to it. She continued writing skits and poems in high school, but she wrote her first short story in Creative Writing as a senior, and she fell instantly in love with literary devices like metaphors and foreshadowing, and knew writing was what she was meant to do. After graduating from high school, she took a course in writing children's literature and learned more about crafting the short story.

Then she got married and her other great passion-her husband Tony-overshadowed everything else in her life for a while. With the addition of three children, her writing was put on a back burner until she attended her 20th high school reunion in 2000 and an old friend asked her if she was still writing. Answering "no" to that question bothered her enough that, 3 months later on her 39th birthday (figuring she only had one more good year left) she started writing True Blue Forever.