Growing up, Jenna always had her nose in a book, dreaming about faraway lands. Her parents owned a bookstore, and at fifteen she convinced them to let her go to an East Coast boarding school on scholarship. She used that prestigious education to work minimum-wage jobs and drop out of two different colleges before, at age twenty-two, she met the man she would marry.
Moving to Ohio for her husband’s job, she finally graduated from Kent State with a degree in English and a minor in writing. She worked in the advertising department of the Akron Beacon Journal until she paid off her student loans, and then decided, with her husband’s encouragement, to pursue her longtime dream of writing novels.
A short seven (!) years later, after many historical manuscripts that just didn’t work, she tried her hand at romance novels. She got “the call” when she was eight months pregnant with her second child.
Jenna spent the next decade and a half raising children while writing romance novels set in exotic locales. Under the name Jennie Lucas (a surname she picked from a handy baby name book), she’s been published in over twenty languages and hit the USA Today extended bestseller list. But in the back of her mind, she still dreamed of someday writing that Epic Historical Novel. So in her spare time, she kept trying.
In summer 2024, while traveling with her now college-age daughter in Japan, Jenna finally got a magical email from Bookouture, offering her a three-book deal for her World War II trilogy about orphans in Paris. It’s a dream come true. A soon-to-be empty nester, she now lives in Idaho with her husband and two dogs, and often still has her nose in a book, dreaming of faraway lands.
