I met Donna Goodrich about thirty years ago, probably at the now-defunct Tempe Christian Writers Club. She was well-known there, as she was a sought-after speaker at Christian writers conferences across the United States. She had a reputation for helping beginning writers. Donna founded the annual Arizona Christian Writers Conference in 1981, which she led for seven years and taught at for many years thereafter.

She was also a wonderful freelance editor and proofreader, as well as the author of twenty-four books and over 700 published articles and poems. For more than twenty-five years, she met weekly with Tuesday’s Children, a critique group I was blessed to be a member of.

She was one of the original bloggers for Doing Life Together; she also maintained her own writing blog, A Step in the Write Direction from 2012-2015.

Here are some of her books:

In the last few years, she’s been struggling with multiple health challenges. Early Thursday morning, she passed away, four days before her birthday. Today she would have been eighty-two years old.

Many writers got their starts with help from Donna. If you are one of them, please leave a memory in the comments below.