BRENDA CANNON was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1890. After teaching school for seven years in that city, she attended the Women¿s Missionary Union Training School in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1919 she went to North Carolina to serve as secretary of a small mission school, which developed into a home for homeless children and continued to serve the young mountaineers of the area as a school. Except for two years spent as a field worker and young people¿s leader in Oklahoma, Cannon remained in North Carolina, teaching school and doing community work. So when she wrote of mountaineers, she wrote understandingly of friends and neighbors. She died in North Carolina in 1965.