Allen Simmons-Cantrell is a collaborative pseudonym for the authors Bea Simmons and Toni Cantrell. Together as Allen Simmons-Cantrell, they’ve written Like Him With Friends Possess’d.

Bea Simmons was smitten by the magic of books and stories as a young child. Poetry became her main center of interest when she began exploring her own writing in junior high school. It wasn’t until the nineties, after taking a creative writing class, that she turned her focus to short stories and novels.

She has two published poems, and she ranked among the top 100 winners in the 1995 Writer’s Digest Writing Competition in the Non-Rhyming Poem category. She is a long-time member of Writer’s Ink of Central Indiana, and is a frequent attendee of the Midwest Writers Workshop in Muncie, IN. Bea derives much of her inspiration for writing from the sights and sounds of nature and the wildlife on her mini-farm where she and her late husband raised their two sons.

Toni Cantrell has been writing since age 12. Born in west central Indiana, she grew up in Anderson. She and her high school sweetheart Manuel, married and have two sons. Toni has three published novels, Strangers and Pilgrims, If Ever That Time Come, and The Gazebo. Under the pseudonym Voni Ryan (with Violet L. Ryan), she has one novel, Absentminded, and one collection of short stories, The Light Side of Dark, due for release in December 2011.

A charter member of a weekly writer’s group called Writer’s Ink of Central Indiana, she has also edited several manuscripts for members of the group. She is a regular attendee at the annual Midwest Writer’s Workshop in Muncie IN., and has traveled extensively to do research for her novels.