Dixiane Hallaj lives in the small town of Purcellville, Virginia, with her cat named Dog. After a long career as an educator and a business woman, she earned her Ph.D. the year she qualified for Medicare. She has been writing award-winning fiction ever since.
Dixiane spent eleven years living and working in the Middle East as part of her husband's extended family. Her novels about Palestinian refugees are based on her experiences during that time and later, when interviewing women in the camps for her doctoral research.
It's Just Lola is based loosely on the life of her grandmother. She enjoyed writing about the family so much that she carried the characters on to another generation with Aunt Nellie B, a lighthearted fiction.