Meet Donnita

Donnita L. Rogers was born in a small Midwestern town during the Great Depression. Raised as a farm girl, she set her sights on higher education, earning a BA in English from Earlham College (a Quaker school in Indiana) followed by an MA and PhD in English from the University of Minnesota with a minor in art history.

Her teaching career included two years at the University of Houston, 18 years at Kingwood High School and 10 years at Lone Star College, all in Texas, while raising a family of four adopted children.

Dr. Rogers’ interest in Beowulf was piqued while introducing teenagers to the epic and wishing she knew more about the lives of the characters in the story – especially the women. Retirement in 2001 was followed by 10 years of library research into pre-Viking history and extensive travel throughout Scandinavia.

She initially published Faces in the Fire, her first novel on the women of Beowulf (in what would later become a trilogy) with iUniverse, an Internet publisher, but the book was subsequently picked up by Bagwyn Books, a division of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University, which published the entire trilogy in successive years: Faces in the Fire, 2013; Fanning the Flames, 2014; Cloak of Ashes, 2015.

Donnita is available to speak to groups large and small, including book clubs, libraries and Sons of Norway gatherings (they serve good coffee). She is the only one thus far to speak about a fictional character instead of a historical personage at the “Fearless Females” lecture series held at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona (which can be viewed on YouTube at keyword “Freawaru”).

Contact Donnita:

• Email:  drdee917@gmail.com
• Website:  http://www.donnitalrogers.com
• Facebook:  Dr. Dee-Viking Voman
• Twitter:   @drdee917
• Amazon author page:  http://www.Amazon.com/Donnita-L-Rogers.