Lori Wolf-Heffner is the author of the young adult series Between Worlds and the sweet romance series Love on Belmont. She was an inaugural member of the Canadian National Tap Team, wrote and submitted a Star Trek novel in her teens (it was rejected—she needed an agent), and spent one day twice in Luxembourg and 15 minutes once in Switzerland. She can still do cartwheels.
Lori was a child of the 80s, the age of girl power on energy drinks and steroids. The 90s for Lori were a rollercoaster ride: high school, national and international dance competitions, the dream of becoming a writer, and the challenges that come with growing up and moving out.
From 1998-2004, Lori alternated between living in Germany and Canada. She then settled down and had a family. In 2008, she wrote her first freelance articles, for Dance Canada Quarterly.
In the following years, Lori built her freelance business, expanding her clientele to magazines such as just dance! and The Dance Current and to companies in several industries, including tech, translation, and the performing arts.
In 2015, CSARN accepted Lori into their one-year mentorship program, and she hasn’t looked back since. (CSARN is the Canadian Senior Artists’ Resource Network.) Mentored by Carol McQuaig, Lori wrote the first version of Postcards in a Closet, a creative non-fiction memoir about a great-grandmother who was a single mom-to-be in the aftermath of World War I. At first printed only for family, Lori published it later for the public.
Inspired by her great-grandmother’s story, Lori wrote and published Between Worlds 1: The Move in 2018. In this series, girls strive to grow up according to their dreams. Whether Juliana today is still trying to discover her life’s goals, or Elisabeth in 1920 dreams of having a family, it’s up to them to decide what paths they want to follow.
In 2020, Lori wanted to branch out into a series for adults that would still have connections to her favourite neighbourhood and even to Between Worlds. Books and tea went well together, but she knew that basing a series in a real but very small location like Belmont Village came with a high level of responsibility: readers might assume that what Lori wrote about had actually happened in real life. She approached the owner of All Things Tea, the real tea shop in Belmont Village, to ensure she could create a fictional tea shop in a romance series. She was given the green light, and Love on Belmont was born.
Lori has her Honours BA in German with a second general major in Psychology from Wilfrid Laurier University, and her MA in German from the University of Waterloo. She lives in Waterloo with her husband and two sons and still occasionally does a cartwheel.
