Barbara Mary Johnson grew up next to the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri and never forgot the mystique of floods, excursion boats, fishing banks and islands for swimming. After thirty years in California, she and her husband Ted, a Minnesotan, bicycled along this Father of Waters from New Orleans to its source, Lake Itasca, Minnesota.

A non-fiction writer and journalism professor in Los Angeles, Johnson wove into her book, Cycling to the Source of the Mississippi River, folklore and folks, adventures and mishaps, and the couple's rediscovery of their roots in the Mississippi Valley.

Her other published books include Pilgrim on A Bicycle, an account of the couple's bicycle trip across America, which sold 30,000 copies. They live with their Lab puppy in California's Central Coast where Barbara is working on a collection of poems about--the bicycle.