Evelyn Rogers

Background

Evelyn Rogers was born on August 30, 1935 in Mobile, Alabama, United States; the daughter of James Richard Graves, a mariner, and Jessie Reynolds (Butler) Lay, a homemaker.

Education

Evelyn Rogers received a Bachelor of Arts in English and journalism from North Texas State University in 1957 and a Master of Arts in library science from Our Lady of the Lake University in 1975.

Career

Evelyn Rogers has made a successful career as a romance and historical novelist after retiring from her teaching career in 1990. She has, however, been a writer throughout her adult life. Her first job after college was as a crime and government reporter for a West Texas newspaper. It was during the last eight years of her teaching career that she began writing historical romances in collaboration with friend Kathryn Davenport, under the pseudonym Keller Graves - a combination of the two women's maiden names. Four more collaborative novels followed between 1987 and 1988.

Rogers eventually went out on her own to write around a dozen more novels for Zebra. The first of these was the 1989 Midnight Sins, and it was followed by a series of novels whose titles indicated the level of passionate heat in their contents, and often, their Southwestern locales: Texas Kiss, Wanton Slave, A Love So Wild, Sweet Texas Magic, Desert Fire, Desert Heat, Flame, and more. In the last novel of that period, the 1995 Angel, a young bride, the last-born girl in her family, marries a man who seeks vengeance upon her father. He takes her from Savannah, Georgia, to Ireland's Bantry Bay in order to separate her from her family; it is at this point that she must teach her new husband the true meaning of love.

After a long, happy association with Zebra Books, Rogers switched to an equally satisfying relationship with the Leisure/Love Spell group, beginning in 1996 with Wicked. This complex novel combines a Western setting, afterlife fantasy, and lighthearted romance. In it, outlaw Cad Rankin is shot dead, but gets a second chance when an angel assigns him to clean up the meanest town in Texas, a place called Rough Cut.

More recent novels have continued to fuel Rogers's success. Published in 1997, The Forever Bride is a time-travel novel set in Scotland. Heroine Meagan Butler, an advertising executive with a romantic streak, wants to be married in a historic Scottish church, but while saying her wedding vows she finds herself transported two hundred years back in time and into the arms of laird Robert Cameron. Fixing the time-glitch and learning to love Robert are Meagan's twin tasks.

Also published in 1997, Betrayal is a Texas-based romance in which heroine Crystal Branden sets out to deceive handsome Conn O'Brien in order to protect her mother and younger brother, but finds herself falling in love with her prey instead. Betrayal resulted in a spinoff novel, Hot Temper, also published in 1997, featuring a character from the earlier book: a half-Indian son of an English earl who inherits his father's Texas ranch and finds himself saddled with a fiery, redheaded cook named Temper.

Rogers's love for and understanding of her Texas homeland has led her to create a series of Westerns, the "Texas Empires" books, that began in 1998 with the novel Texas Empires: Crown of Glory. In this series, readers are told of the establishment of a great ranch, and the passionate men and women involved in that undertaking.

Like other top romance novelists, Rogers has also contributed novellas to her publisher's seasonal anthologies. For HarperMonogram's Seasons of Love, she wrote "Gentle Rain," the story of a romance between a Tennessee ingenue who wants to go to the big city and a bootlegger with a bad reputation. For Leisure's Indulgence, she penned "The Gold Digger," a tale of a young woman who yearns to marry for money but finds herself involved in true love instead. Two earlier novellas, "Cactus and Thistle" and "A Christmas Wagon," were Christmas specials for Zebra collections published in 1991 and 1993 respectively.

In addition to writing about her home state of Texas, Rogers has expanded into the Gothic romance genre with a series of books. Devil in the Dark opens with young heiress Lucinda Fairfax traveling from New York to England to claim her estate in North Yorkshire.

Rogers's third Gothic, The Ghost of Carnal Cove, takes the author back to familiar ground: the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England. Heroine Makenna Lindsay arrives on the remote seaside village to mend a broken heart after being spurned by the man she loves. Instead of the peace and quiet she expected Makenna instead finds intrigue and romance via the dashing and arrogant sea captain Nicholas Saintjohn. But can he be trusted?

All in all, Evelyn Rogers wrote 30 best-selling romance novels and six novellas.

Achievements

• Evelyn Rogers is the author of thirty best-selling romance novels and six novellas. She has been listed as a notable author, educator, and librarian by Marquis Who's Who. Evelyn received several awards, among which is the First annual Prism award for a best light paranormal novel.

Works

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  • Angel

    (Forced to leave her Savannah home to marry Irishman Quent...)

    1995
  • Sable Sins

    (A beautiful young Russian countess goes to California dur...)

  • Wicked

    (Gunned down after a bank robbery, Cad Rankin is offered a...)

    1996
  • Golden Man

    (Stephen Marshall was the kind of guy that made a woman th...)

    1999
  • Texas Kiss

    (Libby Chandler was hanged if she'd wear a fancy dress to ...)

    1989
  • Raven

    (Haunted by memories of the terrible night that left her i...)

    1995
  • Betrayal

    (If there was anything that got Conn O'Brien's Irish up, i...)

    1997
  • Hot Temper

    (Half-Comanche and the son of an English earl, Harvard-edu...)

    1997
  • More Than You Know

    (Once Toni Cavender was Hollywood's most popular leading a...)

    2004
  • Dark of the Moon

    (Matt Hunter leaves his family's Half-Moon Ranch to journe...)

    2003
  • Mysteries of Lost Angel Inn

    (When Ellie Gresham arrives at the inn for a mystery weeke...)

    2004
  • The Loner

    (In the midst of the vast, windswept Texas plains stands a...)

    2004
  • Wanton Slave

    (When Sarah's father shipped her off to Constantinople to ...)

    1990
  • Flame

    (Lovely Flame Chadwick was bound for the sun-scorched trai...)

    1994
  • Crown of Glory

    (Crown of Glory launches a series of books about the found...)

    1998
  • The Ghost of Carnal Cove

    (Betrayed by her first lover, Makenna Lindsay flees London...)

    2002
  • The Grotto

    (Kate, a young American widow, heads to Tuscany to rebuild...)

    2002
  • Second Opinion

    (After five years of a miserable marriage to Roger Ryan, D...)

    1999

Membership

Evelyn Rogers is a member of the Romance Writers of America, National Society of Arts and Letters, Novelists, Inc., San Antonio Romance Authors and Opera Guild of San Antonio.

Interests

• nineteenth-century opera, world travel

Connections

Evelyn Rogers married Jay Dee Rogers, a newspaperman, on March 22, 1957. The couple has two children - Laura and Larry.

Father:

James Richard Graves

Mother:

Jessie Reynolds (Butler) Lay

Spouse:

Jay Dee Rogers

child:

Laura Rogers

child:

Larry Rogers