The author of From Pass to Pass: A Tale of Adventure from Wyoming to India has based her historical novel on her great-grandparents who homesteaded a cattle ranch on Pass Creek in northwestern Wyoming. Abby was raised on her parents’ ranch near Wyola, Montana, which is on the Crow Indian Reservation. In 1959 the family moved to Tucson, Arizona, where Abby completed a degree in music education at the University of Arizona and a Master of Arts degree at Arizona State University in Tempe. She briefly attended the University of California, Los Angeles, before she decided to join the United States Peace Corps and was posted in Niger, Africa.
After returning to Arizona she eventually returned to New York City for photography school and a career in the wholesale travel business. However, her heart was set on experiencing other cultures and she enrolled in a PhD program in anthropology at Rutgers. This endeavor found her doing research on ritual behavior in Ladakh, India from 1982-85. Although she didn’t complete her degree goal the Ladakhi people lodged in her heart and she returned to the region many times. In 2011 she began writing a historical novel which, in the end, took her ten years to complete. Because of its length she found a self-publishing service, BookBaby, that converted the manuscript into an ebook. It was released by Amazon on March, 13, 2023, the day after her eightieth birthday.
During the writing of her novel, Abby engaged in exhibiting her fine art photographs at galleries in Connecticut, where she has won several awards. She is also a poet, having published several poems in a variety of journals and reviews. Simultaneously, she has expanded her creative efforts to painting watercolors and abstract acrylics and exhibiting some of her pen-and-ink drawings and pastels.
Abby lives in the Connecticut countryside with her partner of forty-eight years and two dogs, a Puli named Zoltan and Lhasa Apso, Tucum. They are the joy of her life.
