Scholar and novelist Judith Stanton invites readers into Deer Diaries, her first collection of poetry. As a scholar, she edited The Letters of Charlotte Smith, a definitive edition that helped restore Smith's reputation as the first Romantic poet and has garnered Stanton the 2017 Distinguished Aluma Award at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A romantic herself, Stanton published four historical romance novels, Wild Indigo and His Stolen Bride with HarperCollins and The Mad Marquis and The Kissing Gate with Leisure Books and Montlake Press. Recently she published her first equestrian suspense, A Stallion to Die For, with her own Cat Crossing Press. Stanton gets much of her inspiration from her farm. Several years ago, on again seeing the three-legged doe grazing under the massive white oak outside her study, she wrote a poem about that doe's courage, releasing her decades-long closet poet to find a new voice and a new mission-documenting the lives of the deer she sees every day on her farm, birds, squirrels, and a very special turtle and snail. Deer Diaries has been for Stanton what authors call a gift book. From the moment she wrote "The Three-Legged Doe," deer she'd watched for decades consorted with her to show her more of their daily lives from comic moments to tragic ones, stock and staple of lives lived wild. Stanton was privileged to have the time, place, and freedom to learn their quirks, humor, resilience, and courage. Friends who've read Deer Diaries tell her without fail that now when they drive their county roads, with deer liable to dart out at any moment, they drive more carefully. May you drive more carefully on your roads too.