Cheryl Miller Thurston grew up on a cantaloupe and watermelon farm in southern Colorado and attended a tiny country school for grades 1-6.
After college, she taught English and language arts classes, grades 7-university level, freelance writing in the summers. She thought most materials provided to English teachers made the subject boring, so she started her own publishing company, Cottonwood Press, Inc., concentrating on materials that were quirky yet instructive and that used a great deal of humor. “We think English should be everyone’s favorite subject!” was the company motto. The company grew and she ran it for many years, until its sale to Prufrock Press (which recently sold to Taylor and Francis).
She has continued writing and editing out of her office studio in Loveland, Colorado. “I’m never short of ideas,” she says. She has a passion for humor and for theater. She has written many plays and musicals that have been produced around the country, and she used the isolation time during the pandemic to write and publish the second of two novels.
In her spare time, Thurston takes tap dancing and yoga lessons, walks, reads widely, plays the accordion, and indulges her spoiled cat. Sadly, she doesn’t share her husband’s passions for sailing, but she is happy that he enjoys musical theater almost as much as she does.