Colleen Balderson

Colleen Balderson never planned to become a novelist. She was too busy being an attorney, raising a family, and living the kind of structured life that doesn't usually include plot twists like “and then I wrote a book.” But in 2022, when both her parents died within two months of each other, grief cracked her world wide open—and out poured stories. Hundreds of them. Her mother's childhood tales, her grandfather's wartime service, decades of family lore that deserved better than to disappear with the people who lived them. So Colleen did what any good attorney would do: she built a case. But this time, the case was for hope, healing, and the kind of redemptive ending her mother always wanted but never got to write herself.

Her mother had Alzheimer's, which meant the same stories cycled through conversations like a broken record—painful at the time, but in hindsight, a strange gift. Colleen heard those stories over and over until they became part of her DNA. After her mother's death, Colleen discovered her grandfather's flight records and military orders from World War II tucked away in forgotten boxes. He'd been a veteran who struggled with alcoholism and died when her mother was just fifteen, leaving behind more questions than answers. When Colleen reached out to the Air Force for more information, they sent her the war diaries—and discovered her grandfather had authored them. Suddenly, the man she'd only known through whispered family tragedy became real: flawed, faithful, fighting battles both in the sky and in his soul.

As a recovering alcoholic with eighteen years of sobriety, Colleen knows something about fighting invisible wars. She understands what it's like to struggle in the dark, to wrestle with demons that don't show up on any battlefield map, and to discover that God's grace is bigger than our worst mistakes. That lived experience gives her writing a raw authenticity you can't fake—because she's not writing about redemption from a distance. She's writing from the trenches, from the other side of surrender, from the messy middle of transformation where miracles happen in the most unexpected ways.

Colleen writes Christian historical fiction because she believes everyone deserves a better ending—even (especially) the broken ones. Her “Flowers Series” weaves together family stories with artistic liberty, giving voice to the veterans, the addicts, the forgotten, and the forgiven. She tackles alcoholism and battle fatigue not as distant historical footnotes, but as timeless human struggles that still echo in living rooms and hearts today. Her characters are flawed heroes stumbling toward grace, and her plots are love letters to the idea that God wastes nothing—not our pain, not our past, not even our most spectacular failures.

When she's not writing novels or practicing law in Louisville, Kentucky, Colleen is probably doing something creative (making shell nativities, designing jewelry), leading a retreat at her parish St. Margaret Mary, or something wildly out of character (she skydived once, loves rollercoasters, and will happily attend her family's Christmas in July pool party—though she draws a hard line at ocean swimming). She's outgoing, funny, friendly, and will be the first to tell you she's unathletic and a terrible speller. She's also faithful, creative, and convinced that the best stories are the ones where broken people find their way home.

About two years into writing her first novel, Colleen almost quit. She's an attorney, after all—this whole novelist thing seemed wildly out of her wheelhouse. She felt overwhelmed trying to cram every family story, every lesson, every redemptive moment into one book. Then she realized something that changed everything: she didn't have to. She could save some stories for other books. She could take things out, add things in, make it truly hers. That permission to breathe, to create, to let the story unfold naturally made writing fun again—and opened the floodgates to countless other novel ideas, both in the series and beyond.

Colleen writes because she feels drawn to it, called to it, compelled by something bigger than herself. She writes to give her mother the gift she never got to give herself: a published book, a happy ending, a story that doesn't end in loss. She writes because God took the heartache of Alzheimer's and turned it into repeated stories she'd never forget. She writes because her grandfather's war diaries revealed that there was so much more to him than his tragic ending—and that truth deserves to be told. Most of all, she writes because she believes in second chances, redemptive grace, and the radical idea that our worst chapters don't have to be our final ones.

Colleen lives in Louisville, Kentucky with her husband Allen, their teenagers, Chris and Annie, and one spunky Berniedoodle named Bennet. When she isn't writing, she practices law at her law firm, The English Law Group, P.S.C.