About Gail Grant Park

Born into a Yankee family (New England pioneer stock), Gail resided in Massachusetts for the first 18 years of life. When she converted from Catholicism to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at the age of 16, and learned of the doctrine of baptism for the dead, being a Yankee paid off in an abundance of local cemeteries and town clerks’ offices that contained the records of her ancestors back to the 1600s. Before long (okay, it took several years), Gail was adept at genealogy and family history work and became a resource and guide to others in this arena.

An early goal was to travel throughout Europe (backpacking with a bestie, staying in hostels …). This dream was realized when Gail met and married a military officer on his way to his first assignment in Brussels, Belgium. Foregoing the backpacking and hostels, for the next 24 years, Gail and Richard shepherded their family of four children around the globe following Richard’s military career.

Gail is an optimist, a Pollyanna, a “silver-lining” kind of gal, so when Richard was plucked from his plum job as Program Manager, Health Professional Education-Europe, in Heidelberg, Germany, to deploy to Saudi Arabia for Desert Storm, Gail found solace and growth in beginning a course of study in oil painting. Tutored by a fellow military spouse, Beth Jepson (an exemplary artist in her own right), Gail began to develop her talents as an artist. She took local sketching classes with her German neighbor, Gaby, and held down the fort at home as CFO, chief cook, and Mom. By the time Richard returned (thankfully unharmed) home from the war five months later, Gail had developed quite a portfolio of sketches and oil paintings, and a new-found confidence as an artist.

Gail married after finishing only one year of college at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, but it earned her enough credits to claim BYU as her “home” university, and for the next twenty years, as she traveled the world, she attended classes at various local and satellite campuses, transferring the credits back to BYU. In 1995 she (finally!) earned her BA in History, with an emphasis on Family and Local History Studies.

Upon her husband’s retirement from the military, Gail’s family moved to Upstate New York to be near her mother and sister. Gail had entered the workforce in their previous assignment in San Antonio as a paraprofessional in the local school district, once her youngest was in school. In Dryden, New York, there was a small local library advertising for a library assistant. Books! What better job is there than to be around books all day? After two years as assistant, the librarian retired and Gail was hired to replace her as Library Director. Lacking proper credentials was not an obstacle, as the library board of directors agreed to help finance her schooling to obtain her MLIS from Syracuse University.

Once Gail and Rich were empty-nesters, they moved to Washington State and both were immediately hired by the Timberland Regional Library System. Gail served as the library manager for the Tumwater Timberland Library for nine years. Her favorite part was helping patrons with their family history research and putting memorable books into the hands of eager young readers.

Gail and Rich retired in 2015 and served as Military Relations missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in England for fourteen months. Not long after their return, they moved to Boise, Idaho, where Gail soon revamped her half-acre yard into an herbal garden. She enrolled in the Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine, where, after two years and 1,000 hours of study in the fields of herbal medicine, botany, foraging, nutrition, medicine making, organic gardening and the cultivation of therapeutic herbs, she gained her certificate of completion in 2024.

Gail’s writing career began in earnest in 2019 when her daughter and author, Rachel Siemers, invited her to join an ANWA (American Night Writers’ Association) writing group. Together, the group published the anthology of short stories entitled, Rainfall: A Rainy-Day Writers’ Anthology on Amazon in 2019. Bitten by the writing bug, Gail went on to write her first novel, We Are Shadows: An Irish Ghost story, and self-published it in 2023. The sequel, The Body in Brú Na Boínne, was published in August 2024.

Gail is now working on book three in the Gallagher Girls Mystery series, tentatively entitled, “Haunting at Hawthorn,” with a publication date of 2025.