ABOUT … RONA

Rona Simmons is an author of historical fiction and nonfiction. For the last several years she has focused her writing on World War II with the books: Images from World War II (published in 2016) The Other Veterans of World War II: Stories from Behind the Front Lines (Kent State University Press in 2020) and A Gathering of Men (Koehler Books in 2022). Both of the latter books were awarded gold medals from the Military Writers Society of America.

Her latest work, No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944, will be released by the University of Missouri Press’s American Military Experience series (edited by author, historian, and professor John C. McManus) in October 2024.

Simmons’s motivation to write about World War II stems from her family’s connections with the military. She is the daughter of a World War II army air forces P-38 fighter pilot, the daughter-in-law of a bomber pilot with the Eighth Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group, and the wife of a former Vietnam-era US Navy pilot.

She is a graduate of Tulane University and received her post-graduate degree from Georgia State University. After a thirty-year career in business, ending with a period with IBM as a business consultant, she launched her next career in writing. Simmons has written for literary journals and online and print magazines and newspapers and is active in her local writing communities. She is a frequent speaker to service groups, military organizations, veterans communities, and writers associations.