Denise Heald earned her B.A. degree in Journalism from California State University at Sacramento, completed course work in Environmental Resources Interpretation at Humboldt State University, and earned her M.A. in Rhetoric and Composition from Boise State University. As adjunct faculty she began teaching English composition courses at BSU and joined the College of Western Idaho in Spring of 2010.
A fiction writer since grammar school, she saw her book Mistwalker, a Del Rey Discovery novel, published in 1994. More than twenty of her short fiction stories have appeared in speculative fiction magazines and anthologies. As an author and professional member of Science Fiction Writers of America, she was a roundtable presentation member at OryCon, NorWesCon, and other science fiction conventions throughout the 1990’s.
Among other previous jobs (having followed her husband through his long career with the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management), she has worked as a seasonal NPS Park Technician, as a US Forest Service fire fighter, as a fire department dispatcher, a Marine Corps Logistics Base accounting technician, a classroom assistant, substitute teacher (the hardest duty of all), a newspaper intern, and more.Today, she pursues her passion for writing through her teaching and her passion for the environment and critical thinking through exploration of the nations largest National Parks.