Stacey Margaret Jones grew up in De Smet, South Dakota, or the real-life Little Town on the Prairie. Her retired-librarian mother kept her in the best books from childhood to young adulthood, cultivating a love of reading and writing that now lies up there with her love of dresses and dogs. She and her brother and neighborhood friends used to play “college” with encyclopedias, which probably was a predictor of her two undergraduate majors, elementary education and English literature, and two master’s degrees, one in communications management from Syracuse University and the other in creative writing from the University of Central Arkansas.
She has worked in a battered women’s shelter, a daily newspaper, a Czech economics university, state universities in South Dakota and Arkansas, a Minneapolis investment bank, an ad agency, a global marketing services company and a private school system before going off on her own to write and provide research services to marketing and public relations clients. Jones’s other avid interest besides education is travel, and she has been to 37 countries, from New Zealand to Bosnia. She lived in Prague for a year in the 1990s, teaching English and traveling Europe with friends and family.
An introvert and the youngest in a family of nine children, Stacey has always been an energetic observer of relationships around her, and her market research career satisfies her keen interest in why people do the things they do. Her poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction focus on such observations and her interest in human behavior, particularly interpersonal relationships. Stacey lives in Conway, Arkansas, with her author husband, Jay Ruud, and their four dogs, where she writes, runs, teaches yoga, walks dogs, obsesses over what she eats, tries to wear all her dresses, and plots her next trip abroad.
