Catherine LaRoche is the romance pen name of Catherine Roach, who is a professor of cultural studies and gender studies in New College at the University of Alabama. Catherine won the Romance Writers of America Academic Research Grant in 2009 and is writing a book on how the story of romance—“find your one true love and live happily ever after”—is the most powerful narrative in popular culture. A lifelong reader of romance novels, she combines fiction writing of historical romance with academic writing about the romance genre for the best of both worlds.When not writing, reading, or teaching about romance, she enjoys hiking, cooking for friends, and spending family summers at a lake in her native Canada, where her loon call is known to sometimes fool the local loons.