Phyllis Hosken Masso grew up in Aurora, Colorado, the fifth of six children. She graduated from Colorado State University where she majored in English/Education and married her husband, Jon. She later completed a Master’s in Library Science at University of Rhode Island. Twenty-two years of their 50-year marriage were spent in the town of Whitinsville, MA, where Phyllis was librarian at Whitinsville Christian School eighteen of those years, near the site of the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor. She decided to write an historical novel to capture its impact on the surrounding towns. Like Betsey Carpenter, in Never the Same Again…, Ms. Masso’s father died at the age of 50, when she was 20 years old. Ms. Masso and her husband had four children, and she used some of the personality traits of herself, her siblings and her children when writing Never the Same Again… After publishing the book in 1998, Ms. Masso and her husband relocated to Kenya for 18 years where she trained librarians in automation and also helped to found a Christian charity for school-aged boys at risk called Ahadi Family Kenya Trust. Her husband died in 2017, and she soon retired back to Whitinsville, MA, near where Betsey Carpenter’s family lived in the 1820’s.
