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Alma A. Hromic
Alma A. Hromic was born in Novi Sad, the city of which she writes in Letters from the Fire. She has, however, lived outside her native country for most of her life. Her father's employment with international aid agencies has meant that the family spent twenty years living in various countries in Southern Africa, a life of which Hromic writes in her 1995 autobiography, Houses in Africa (David Ling Publishers, Auckland, New Zealand).
Educated in the United Kingdom and South Africa, Hromic graduated from the University of Cape Town with an MSc in Microbiology in 1987. She quickly left the lab in order to write about it instead, and spent several years running a scientific journal for the Allergy Society of South Africa before she moved to New Zealand in 1994.
In her new country, she quickly obtained a position of Editor with an international educational publisher, where she worked for several years. Aside from Houses in Africa, Hromic's publishing record includes The Dolphin's Daughter and Other Stories, a bestselling book of three fables published by Longman UK in 1995, as well as numerous pieces of short fiction and nonfiction published internationally in South Africa, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
R. A. Deckert
R. A. Deckert spent nearly two decades as copy editor, wire editor and news editor at several metropolitan newspapers, including the Miami Herald and Miami News, before becoming a freelance writer. His articles and stories on everything from alligator farming to UFOs have appeared in numerous national publications. He has written two young adult novels under a pen name.
Long before the Internet became a mass-market phenomenon, Deckert was active on local and regional computer bulletin boards, and once narrated an on-line wedding. These boards, miniature versions of online services like AOL, helped prepare millions of computer users for the wonders of the Internet, offering the equivalent of chat rooms and newsgroups (discussion groups) at a time when the Internet was still mostly the province of college students and computer nerds.
Deckert is currently involved with several Internet newsgroups and has an active email correspondence with friends all over the world, many of whom he has never met in RL (real life).
