When Dharma Kelleher earned her bachelor's degree in journalism from the esteemed Grady College of Journalism in the late 1980s, and became the news director at a metro Atlanta radio station, she figured her writing career was off to a great start. It wasn't.

Over the next decade, Dharma would struggle through one challenge after another including two failed marriages, several periods of financial collapse, suicidal depression and alcoholism.

After getting sober in 1996, she began rebuilding her life and facing life's challenges with new hope and wisdom yielded from her program of recovery. She soon met her current wife Eileen and the two wed in 1998.

About the time she celebrated her tenth year of sobriety, she began writing again. At first she focused on nonfiction, sharing her hard-earned experience, strength and hope, as well as her quirky sense of humor. She published a handful of essays in both local and national publications.

At the age of 41, she began writing her first novel A Sense of Community, which tells the story of a young lesbian struggling to stay sober while trying to stay connected to the bar-dominated gay community she loves.

She describes the two painful decades between her failed journalism career and her new career writing novels as an unintentioned campaign of plot gathering. According to Dharma, the years of failure, addiction, and anguish are the perfect fodder to give her fiction a depth that can sometimes be lacking in lesbian fiction.

She currently lives near Phoenix, Arizona with her wife and three cats, where she is hard at work on two other novels and serves as host to the lesbian fiction podcast Dead Sappho's Society, and as an advice columnist for the popular lesbian Web site TheLesbianLifestyle.com.