LeAnn was born on July 27, 1954 in Iowa, USA, and raised on a farm in Guthrie County. She received a Bachelor of Arts in journalism from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, after three years of study and maintained a 3.93 grade-point average. She received the Robert Bliss Award as top-ranking senior in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and won a national William Randolph Hearst Award for feature-writing as an undergraduate.
When she was fifteen, LeAnn wrote her first romance novel and burned it. She burned five more complete manuscripts before submitting to a publisher on Friday the Thirteenth. In 1984, the first submission was accepted by Harlequin, the only publisher to look at it, and was published. She writes using the name Leigh Michaels, a combination of her own name and that of her husband Michael W. Lemberger, an artist/photographer. Now, she is the author of more than 85 contemporary romances for Harlequin. She writes sweet, traditional romances, set in Midwestern cities or small towns, and emphasising family values.
More than 27 million copies of her books have been printed, worldwide, in 650 editions. Her work has been translated and published in 120 countries in more than 20 languages, including Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, German, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Turkish, He…
