About
Brenda Ratliff, writing as BrendaGail, is a contemporary Christian romance writer and the creator of the Found Family series — stories built on the conviction that belonging is not a matter of bloodlines, but of grace. Her debut novel, A Family of Her Own, follows a woman determined to claim her future and a man learning to surrender his past, and opens the door to the community at the heart of everything she writes: one where faith, love, and laughter hold people together through the full weight of real life.
Her heroes wear their strength like armor in the world and lay it down only for the women they love. Her heroines are strong enough to fight for what they want and brave enough to be vulnerable with the men who have proven themselves worthy of their trust. And God is never background decoration in these pages. He is the quiet, steady presence woven through every turn of the story. She is especially passionate about portraying culturally-diverse characters in authentic, nuanced ways, and about creating fictional communities that reflect a truth she holds personally: it really does take a village, and the village is worth writing about.
For more than fifteen years, BrendaGail has written and directed original productions for church drama ministry. She has performed in community theater since 2012, including lead roles, and that time in front of an audience — feeling the moment a story lands or slips away — continues to shape how she approaches character, pacing, and the kind of emotional payoff that stays with a reader long after the last page.
Her professional life has deepened her fiction more quietly. More than two decades as a legal assistant have given her a ground-level understanding of human conflict — not the dramatic kind, but the slow, complicated, costly kind that lives in the decisions people make when the stakes are real, and the options are few. She brings that same attention to the moral and emotional texture of her work.
She holds a B.S. in English and Creative Writing from Liberty University and is currently pursuing her MFA in Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University. She is a member of the League of Romance Writers, where she continues to grow alongside fellow authors who take the genre seriously.
She writes because she believes some readers need to find on the page what they haven't yet been able to find in their own lives — proof that they are loved, that their story isn't over, and that the village is still out there waiting for them. She hopes her fiction is one small part of how they find it.
When she's not writing, BrendaGail is reading, cruising with her husband, cooking for her family, and spoiling her granddaughter — the people and moments that remind her why stories about love, faith, and belonging matter in the first place.