Monica Lee is a personal historian, blogger and writer whose work has appeared in the Middletown Journal and St. Cloud Times and marketing materials for Creative Memories and Homemade Gourmet. She lives in northern Illinois with her second husband. In the '90s, Lee was the editor-in-chief at the St. Cloud State University Chronicle, a daily newspaper reporter for four years at the Middletown (Ohio) Journal and a copy desk editor for four years at the St. Cloud (Minn.) Times. As a reporter, she covered city council meetings, murder trials, hundreds of community events and the U.S. National Hot Air Balloon Championship in 1992. In addition to writing literally thousands of news stories during her time in Middletown, she wrote a weekly entertainment column. During her time as a reporter and editor, she earned several awards including a Well Done from Gannett Newspaper Division, second place citation from the Minnesota Associated Press Association, Minnesota Newspaper Association General Reporting Award and was named a Society of Professional Journalists Outstanding Graduate in Journalism. She relied on her experience gathering information and interviewing sources to write 'The Percussionist's Wife." For the past four years, Lee has been blogging daily about life's ephemera at Minnesota Transplant (http: //minnesotatransplant.wordpress.com/), a blog is about her everyday life as a former Minnesotan, transplanted into a tiny suburb of Chicago.