Toft, Candace Boughn

cantof@cox.net
www.candacetoft.com
La Mesa, CA 91941

Platte County

Biographical and Professional Information

Candace Toft grew up in Wheatland, Wyoming and received her B.A. at the University of Wyoming, her M.A. at Denver University.

She won her first award in 1999 for Best Personal Essay in University publications, Western Region; the piece, entitled "Not Just Another Cancer Story" had been submitted on behalf of the National University periodical "Insight" and was later published in "Coping Magazine", under the title, "The Love That Sees Me through." In 2000, her novel A MINGLED YARN won first runner-up in the San Diego Book Awards unpublished novel, so she submitted two pieces in 2002 and won runner-up for poetry Chapbook with POEMS TO MY MOTHER and for THE TRAP in the category of Novelist Grant Award. In 2004, Candace and her co-author Gordon Ooley won first place in San Diego Book Awards Unpublished novel category for EMERGENCE.

Candace has always been an educator, serving as a teacher, a middle school principal and the Director of Credentials at National University in San Diego. She is currently an adjunct professor there.

Genres

Fiction

Published Novels:

THE TRAP

Nobody ever leaves the isolated town of Los Trampas, New Mexico. Does everyone stay because they are victims of an ancient curse or because the fear of leaving has been passed through generations?

A MINGLED YARN

The heroine of A Mingled Yarn, having given up her baby girl for adoption 23 years before, encounters a young woman who may or may not be her daughter. This exciting mainstream novel has the feel and pace of a mystery, but the mystery is solved in none other than the human heart

A THOUSAND STRANDS

Twenty years after the killing of two F.B.I. agents on Pine Ridge Reservation Leonard Peltier still languishes in Leavenworth Federal Prison. No one believes he is guilty. This mainstream novel provides an imaginative solution to the mystery that continues to intrigue a large body of readers. The focus of A Thousand Strands, however, is the impact that case and other 1970's Native American political events had on the lives of its two main characters, Joseph Standing Horse and Susan Gallager.