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Ramona Mitchell's Stories of my Life is her uniquely rewarding autobiography of heart, family, struggle, and art set on the real-life stages of WWII Germany, her dangerous passage from Europe's turmoil to the desert and color of mid-century Cairo, to the artistic and academic community of Chicago, and her return to desert in southwest New Mexico. Mitchell gives us her torn childhood and the escape from wartime Europe; teen years of having to choose between Olympic swimming and painting, her great twin passions. She gives us the growth from girl to woman, while offering the spiritual growth which moved her toward Yoga and Vedic Chant, and the fabulous journey from the world of her mother's professional artistry, to her own. To this she adds the great, colorful map of her family, her friends, from multiple cultures and nations. The loves in her life, the international travels, joys, and survivals, and the vast array of her paintings and sculptures give us a history of many lives, many lands, and a creativity that has spanned decades, made from cultures and lands that have since changed to be almost unrecognizable. Here's how to love another person's lifetime, all in one book.
--Roger Steinmetz

About the Author
Ramona Mitchell is an artist and yoga teacher living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She paints large abstract paintings and is a certified Yasodhara yoga teacher.
    She was born Rosemarie Hilpert in Berlin, Germany, but spent some of her early childhood years in the Palatine area of Germany, near the French border, to escape the Allied bombs falling on Berlin. After the war, she and her mother and sister became war refugees and eventually found their way to Cairo, Egypt. In Cairo she was accepted at the Academy Des Beaux Arts and began her art studies under Jaro Hilbert for 4 years. This was followed by a scholarship at the University of Georgia, USA, and 4 years in the Art Academy in Kassel, Germany, earning a Master’s degree in Fine Art. While in Kassel, her university friends decided she looked more like a “Ramona” than a “Rosemarie,” and thus changed her name. After graduation, she briefly returned to Egypt before moving to Nairobi, Kenya, where her mother’s sister lived. In Nairobi, she built an art studio and began exhibiting. It was there that she met her future husband, Alex Mitchell, a fellow artist from Scotland. When Alex received an offer to become Chairman of the Fine Arts Department at Lake Forest College in Illinois, he and Ramona relocated to Lake Forest and spent the next thirty years there. Ramona continued to paint and exhibit. She also took her studies of yoga to a new level, training at Yasodhara Ashram at Kootenay, British Columbia, Canada, and eventually receiving certification as a Yasodhara yoga teacher.
    Ramona and Alex retired to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1994.  Alex died in 1996. Today Ramona continues to paint and exhibit, as well as teach yoga in her home studio.