Toni Kief is a small-town Midwesterner from a family of high spirits and laughter. Her father claimed that she was named after a stripper in the 1940s. She teases about leaving Pekin, Illinois, in her graduation cap and gown for Arizona and then Florida.

While in Florida, she was the first woman outside casualty insurance adjuster and continued the work in Washington. Florida lit Toni’s long-time civil rights activism, counted in miles marched and multiple news interviews. It was the Tampa police that told her of threats on her life. Toni doesn’t hesitate to tell stories of lunches with politicians, writers, and artists. Often, she brags about an FBI file which is probably a paper folder rusting in a metal cabinet of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington DC.

It was in the mid-80s when she joined generations of her maternal family in Marysville, WA. All three sisters moved knowing their mother planned to relocate to her hometown. That was the plan, and it was not only family but also the view of forty colors of green and snow-capped mountains that sealed it.

Toni is the rare extroverted writer, who can be trusted with your secrets, but not her own. When it comes to writing, she defines her genre as OA –old adult, aka Matron or Boomer fiction. She started writing from a dare and was over 60. Her first book, Old Baggage, was published at the age of 67. The unexpected series followed that book. Toni swears that her only involvement in the Mildred Unchained series was thinking of the main character’s name. Then Mildred Petrie took over her life. Toni has also written a historical fiction based on a nine-times great-grandmother and recently published *more than a footnote, a collection of short bios of women neglected by history.

Toni began walking with the pandemic, looking for inspiration and picked up over 1,500 bags of trash. The mayor heard about it, and Toni was named the Marysville Volunteer of the Month and awarded a golden grabber. She is still stunned as the news stories spread around northwestern Washington.

One more thing, she co-founded the Writers Cooperative of the Pacific Northwest with Susan Brown, a prolific author of multiple genres. The gathering of local writers survived the pandemic and continues to grow.

She promises that in this late incarnation, she will continue to gather stories prime for embellishment no matter where the walks take her.