Award-Winning writer Diane Covington-Carter calls herself a "late-bloomer baby-boomer" since she has accomplished
so many interesting things when most people are considered "over the hill."
In her late forties, she bought a run down apple farm in the foothills of the Sierras
and took on restoring it and taking care of it, all on her own.
At age fifty, she moved to France for eight months to do her "junior year abroad
thirty years late" and had a fabulous time. Her memoir, "Eight Months in Provence, A Junior Year Abroad Thirty Years Late," was an Amazon Best Seller in its first week in 2016.
At sixty she fell in love with and then married the man of her dreams, and they now live together
on the apple farm and also in New Zealand, when they are not traveling around the world
to other exotic and interesting places. "Falling in Love Backwards, An Unlikely Tale of Happily Ever After," 2013, co-written with her husband, Landon Carter, tells that tale.
*GOLD AWARD:
In 2018, her third memoir, "Finding Gilbert, A Promise Fulfilled," won a Gold award from the Society of American Travel Writers Western Chapter. It tells the true story of how she found her father's beloved French orphan, Gilbert, from World War II. Though it was fifty years late, he did become her 'brother' and she is still close to four generations of his family.
The faculty at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, who judged the writing competition, had this to say about the book:
"This is a gripping travel memoir of how childhood stories of World War II turn into a quest. A lot of travel is driven by the quest for answers-and this book fulfills that desire to find the truth in faraway places. This piece about a father's love and fulfilling a promise to a French war orphan is well done, and a recommended read."
*WILLA AWARD
Her first historical Middle Grade/Young Adult novel, "Beautiful Courage, A Young Woman's Journey West, 2019," was chosen as a finalist for a WILLA Award, 2020. The award, is named in honor of Pulitzer Prize winning author Willa Cather, one of America's foremost novelists, and honors the best in literature, featuring women's or girls' stories set in the West that are published each year. The judges are professional librarians, historians and university affiliated educators.
This tender, coming of age story is told through the letters and journal of a young girl bound for California in 1852.
*LOWELL THOMAS TRAVEL JOURNALISM AWARD, 2020
Covington-Carter has received many awards for her travel journalism, most recently a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism award for an essay in the Los Angeles Times for the 75th anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 2019, which she attended in her father's honor.
She also received an award for a photo essay from that event, published in France Today Magazine, from the Society of American Travel Writers.
Covington-Carter believes that if you have dreams that you have put on the back burner, go ahead, dust them off!
It is never too late to bloom. It is never too late to fly.
