DeAnn Rossetti:  

After graduating from Ankeny High School in 1979, I attended Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa and carried a double major in theater and history. I graduated from Clarke in 1983, and immediately flew to Cambridge, Mass, where I attended graduate school at Lesley College, getting my master of arts in writing in 1985. I worked as a freelance writer and proofreader, eventually landing a job as senior editor of a lifestyle magazine in St Petersburg, Florida. I started working out with a group called Women At Large in 1987 and lost 100 pounds, and met my husband Jim in 1988. We drove across the US together toward a new future in 1991 in Seattle, Washington. After freelancing for awhile I became the lifestyle and business reporter for the Mercer Island Reporter, a well respected weekly newspaper in 1997, and married Jim at the Museum of Flight that same year. I miraculously became pregnant with our son Nicholas James in 1999, and gave birth by emergency c-section on November 27 of that year. I was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease in 2001, and w...Expand for more