Deborah Bedford was born in Texas and earned her degree in journalism and a minor in marketing from Texas A&M University. Immediately after graduation, she accepted editorship of Evergreen Today, a weekly newspaper based in the small mountain town of Evergreen, Colorado. While serving as editor there, Deborah worked 70 or 80 hours each week, writing stories and cut-lines, sports and features, chasing fire trucks and checking police reports, taking pictures, editing, laying out pages, opaquing the negatives, stacking papers into vending machines, and taking out the quarters.

When she married her husband, Jack, in 1982, Deborah took a position as account executive and copywriter for a Colorado advertising agency. It was during this stint at the ad agency that she began to dream of returning to her first love, fiction writing. This dream became reality in 1984 when she rented an IBM Selectric typewriter and set to work late at night and early in the mornings, whenever she could find the time to write.

For her birthday in the summer of 1984, Jack bought her a copy of the 1984 Writers' Market, and she began to meticulously send letters to every publisher listed in the book. To this day, she and her husband laugh about it and call that time the 'media blitz.' Rejection letters flowed back by the handfuls. She has a large folder where, for posterity's sake, she has kept these to this day. She has also kept the letter from Harlequin Books she received, which invited her to submit a complete manuscript but warned her that Harlequin did not want books about cowboys, airline pilots, guest ranches or Texans.

Deborah laughs now when she tells the story. Her manuscript was the story of “a woman who marries an airline pilot in Texas. Then, when he dies in a plane crash, she runs away to a guest ranch and falls in love with a cowboy.” When she showed her husband, Jack, the letter, he said, “Honey, you've managed to write a manuscript that has everything in it they don't want.” Harlequin bought the manuscript five short weeks after Deborah submitted it.

When Deborah's first book, Touch The Sky, was released by Harlequin Superromance, its sales topped every Harlequin record for a first-time author. It earned rave reviews and a Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice award. At that time, Deborah's editor told her, 'This book isn't a romance, but we're going to publish it anyway.'

During the next seven years, Deborah published six more books with Harlequin Superromances and a historical novel, Blessing, before signing a contract with HarperCollins Publishers. This paved the way for her to move on to write mass-market mainstream women's fiction, where her work garnered numerous awards and appeared on the USA Today bestseller list.

The word Deborah uses to describe her career is 'beguiling.' Whenever she wrote words about Jesus or God in her stories, those spiritual overtones were never touched, edited or omitted. But, along with those words, Deborah admits that she was writing sex scenes. "I wanted all the reward that the world would give me," she says. "I wanted all the fame, and all the status. But I realized that I was giving away lentils in the Lord's battlefield. That's when I became convicted. The time had come for a change."

What surprises Bedford the most, she says, is the freedom she now finds in writing for her Heavenly Father. "It feels like gloriously falling forward and wondrously coming home, all at the same time," she says.

The Story Jar, published in March 2001 by Multnomah Publishers, written along with Angela Elwell Hunt and Robin Lee Hatcher, and including pieces from Left Behind author Jerry Jenkins, and Francine Rivers, Debbie Macomber and Lori Copeland, marks Deborah's writing debut for the inspirational market. It held a spot on the CBA Bestseller List for three consecutive months.

While still shopping for the right publisher for her novel-length fiction, Deborah had the opportunity to stand up at the Jackson Hole Writers' Conference, read an excerpt from The Story Jar, and explain to conference attendees about the call she felt to leave mass-market fiction and follow the Lord. In the audience that evening was Jamie Raab, publisher of Warner Books. The rest, as everyone says, felt like stars moving into place.

A Rose By The Door, Deborah's first with Warner Book', hit bookstores in November 2001. A Morning Like This was released by Warner Books in 2002. Deborah's short story, “Connor Sapp's Baseball Summer,” is included in Multnomah Publisher's The Storytellers' Collection, Tales From Home, alongside stories by Chuck Colson, Terri Blackstock, Randy Alcorn and Karen Kingsbury.

Deborah and Jack have two children, Jeff, 18, and Avery, 15. When she isn't writing, Deborah spends her time fly-fishing, cheering at American Legion baseball games, shopping with her daughter, singing praise songs while she walks along the banks of Flat Creek, and taking her dachshund Annie for hikes in the Tetons where they live.

“I am writing with the joy of a new love,” Deborah says. “My journey to Warner Books has been not so much a decision but a beautiful process of being picked up and carried over. This is only the beginning. Where I thought constraints would box me in as a writer, where I thought I might have to make my stories smaller to fit into a Christian mold, the opposite has proven true. I am seeing, in my writing, that these stories must be written big, in the same transparent way that our lives must be lived as Christians. To gloss over problems we have, to make things seem easier than they are, is to gloss over the power of what our loving Heavenly Father can do.”