About CJ

Cyndie “CJ” Zahner grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, the second child of hard-working parents, Pasquale and Donna Mae Filutze. Her brother Mike, eleven years her senior, married when she was nine years old. Often alone, Cyndie created characters and wrote stories.  During high school, an English teacher, Mrs. Patricia Root, introduced her to a world of reading and writing that would remain with her for life. In her senior year, she enrolled as an English major at Gannon College, now Gannon University.

Yet, in the summer before college, she worked at a local retail store as a sales clerk alongside four women with English degrees. Worried, she changed her major to Accounting but never lost her love for reading and want of writing. While working in the business world, she wrote grants and contributed financial and women’s articles to local magazines and newspapers.

She fell in love and married her soul mate, Jeffrey Zahner, with whom she had four children. She is the proud mother of three adult children, Jessie, Zak, and Jillian Zahner, and one little angel in heaven, Jackie Zahner. She is also grandmother to Layla Grace, Teddy James, and Alina Miri.

In 2015, she began looking at life differently when her brother and his wife were diagnosed with dementia and early-onset Alzheimer’s. It was then that Cyndie’s husband pulled her aside and said, “Quit your job. You’re a writer.” After twenty years of service and the combating of repeated health issues caused by stress, Cyndie picked up her purse one day at work and quietly walked away. She never returned. She began her career as a novelist.

Since then, she has written four  thrillers, The Suicide Gene, Dream Wide Awake, Project Dream, & The Dream Diaries; three Chick Lit novels, Friends Who Move Couches, Don’t Mind Me, I Came with the House, & Please Post Bail, Love Mom: and a memoir, The House that Loved; A DES Story.

On most days, she runs, reads, writes, smiles much, and dreams up her next novel. When not writing, you’ll find her running with friends or visitting/babysitting grandchildren.

She thanks God everyday for her husband, children, grandchildren, good friends, and—–for bringing her home.