Girl Come & Get Your Blessings

About the author

Born January 24, 1975 in Saint Petersburg, Florida to Katie Mae Smiley, Shalona was the last of twelve children. She was often sick as a child and her illness caused her to be separated from the rest of the kids. After being isolated for years she began to get bored with watching television so she began to write. She wrote anything that came to mind and anything that rhymed. Shalona’s writing was first noticed in the fifth grade when she won a poetry contest for grandparent’s day. She touched the lives of many grandparents that day. However, she never had any grandparent’s of her own. Her grandmother was poisoned when her mother was just six weeks old and her mother never knew her father. Her teachers all saw something in her that she was too young at the time to understand.

When entering middle school she continued writing hiding her work under her bed.

As the years passed Shalona went on to high school finishing in her tenth month of pregnancy. By the time she graduated she was already the mother of a 2 year old little girl then later gave birth to her second child ten days after her graduation. She was just eighteen years old at the time. Two days after bringing her new child home from the hospital the devil tried to take her joy. Her first child’s father had showed up to her door with the police after filing an emergency ex parte motion. He was accusing her of abusing her child. After thirty days without her child custody was returned to her. Her child was finally able to return home but the incident scarred her daughter for life. It didn’t take her long to notice that the daughter that had left her wasn’t the same one that returned.

She was in college when she conceived her third child and later dropped out to help her mother who was caring for eleven children that were placed in her home by the court system. In 1994 she gave birth to her third child a baby girl. Three years after giving birth to her daughter she gave birth to her last child and only son. Ten months later she buried him after he died from Myocarditis a heart condition. One month later she closed on her first home, she was only 21 years of age. Shalona went on to work at a well known company for the next four years doing telemarketing making no less than nine hundred dollars a week. She realized that if she could make the company she was working for money then she could make money starting her own company. At the time she had three little kids and really didn’t know which way to go so she did the thing that she knew how to do she kept working.

In 2006, Shalona began to focus more on her writing. She began submitting her work to different sites and was even featured on a couple of them. Her work has been featured on Invisible Verse and also Kuma 2.net under the pseudonym Shaylove. Not long after she received news that her mother’s kidneys were failing. She put everything on hold to take care of her. After a year of caring for her mom and attending college full time her sister took over and in 2008 as she began writing an empowerment book for women. When she told people that she was writing a book many of them laughed at her. The laughs didn’t discourage her instead they empowered her. With God’s blessing she started her company Soul on Fire Publishing in October 2008, and then she met a sex addict. Just Years earlier she had started to write diary entries entitled Diary of a Sex Addict hoping one day to write a book. She then put the empowerment book on hold and in a week in a half wrote the true story of a sex addict from Tampa Florida. After getting positive feedback on part one she decided to give the readers what they were asking for part two which will be out in December of 2009. In October 2009 Shalona will publish Girl, Come & Get Your Blessings: An Inspirational Book for Women. After reading her first book, the readers asked her to write a book based off her letter to readers in her debut novel. Shalona has several other projects that she is also working on. All of them will be published under her publishing company Soul on Fire Publishing. She also has a new author Lovelle, the author of Raw & Uncut: An Erotic Street Anthology who will have a book released in November 2009. She’s not interested in being signed with a major publishing company or working for someone else.

While marketing her books, Shalona returned to the same place where she had experienced hard times. She was shown so much love and today her books are in the hands of many that she met years ago. She began feeding the homeless at Thanksgiving and in 2008 and will feed them every year for many years to come. She believes that when she’s blessed she should give back to those that are in need. She knows what it’s like to go without and she also knows what it’s like to be homeless.

Shalona resides in Pinellas Park, Florida with her three teenagers. Her future plans include starting her own magazine and an organization for kids of single parents or with no parent. She would also like to start an organization that helps grandparents that are raising their grandkids also. Her goal is to see her books made into movies. Until then she will keep writing and giving her readers what they want, good writing.

About the book

Girl Come & Get Your Blessings is an inspirational and empowerment book for women. We learn about Gods love for us and how we as women should love ourselves. We also learn how to develop that relationship with God and how to deal with hurt and pain from the past.

This book also covers just how important it is to change your mind set and surround yourself with positive people and things. For those of you who are going through things in life and wondering…where is God when I need him? Turn the pages and you’ll find the answer to your question.

You will find true stories of women, these women allow us into their lives so that we as readers can see exactly what they went through and how they overcame these things. One of the women in the book that tells her story tells us how she was addicted to drugs, a victim of incest, and how she saw angels. She goes on to tell us how the Holy Spirit spoke to her and guided her through the streets of Miami Florida.

This book is very deep and real and there is something that all women can take from this book. My story is included in this book as well. Many of the stories in this book will touch you in many different ways; many of you may be going through or may have gone through many of the same things. My family has never known the things about me that I have included in this book about myself. When they turn the pages it will be the first time they too will read my story, life’s lessons are truly our blessings.


Her books are available on:
http://www.soulonfirepublishing.com/
http://www.booksamillion.com/
http://www.amazon.com/
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/