ABOUT JOELLE STEELE

This is waaaaay more than most people want to know about me! But if you want all the gory details, you can read about them in my book Garbageman's Daughter -- it's a read-only PDF.

Steele's a high-IQ (186) polymath with extensive credentials in many fields. She is a writer, editor, artist, photographer, and publisher. She is a court-certified expert in face and ear identification, forgery detection, and the usual and customary practices of the landscape industry. She is also a genealogist, astrologer, and legal writer.

As of 2026, Steele is the author of 64 books (fiction, non-fiction, and a few translations); 39 genealogical histories (for clients); 800+ articles; 50+ short stories; 9 advice columns; 94 contracts; and numerous co-writes, contributing chapters, poems, lyrics, ad copy, jingles, speeches, interviews, and other works for hire.

Steele was born in 1951 in San Francisco as Nancy Norleen Martelli. She had her name legally changed to Joelle Steele in 1990. The family moved to the Monterey Peninsula in 1955.

Steele's parents both liked to write and were avid readers. She was reading by the age of 3, and is also an avid reader of fiction and non-fiction. She reads at least one book per week, to the tune of more than 3,250 books to date. Her writing career began early in life too. She adapted a play from a children’s novel at age 10, wrote her first and only play at age 13, wrote her first novel at age 16, another at age 19, and a third at age 21. Those novels, though not suitable for publishing, were a learning experience in developing characters and plots.

Steele's parents both loved art and writing and could draw and write well, although they never did so professionally. Her step-grandfather was a trained artist from Italy, and some of her mother's friends were artists. As a child, Steele had nine years of art instruction in Carmel, California. Her work was displayed at seven student art shows before she graduated from high school. She had her first art show of eight very large oils in 1976. Ten years later, she created acrylic paintings for designers to match their clients' needs in southern California. She has also taught watercolor painting to adults. Today, she is a collector of etchings and art, and she wrote Souvenirs of Europe and What Did They Really Look Like?

Her parents also came from families who never went anywhere without their cameras. She joined their ranks by the age of 10, and she had a wide variety of cameras, mostly Rolleis. As an adult, she owned a portrait photography business and photographed portfolios for others in southern California. She still loves photography, digitally restores old photos, and likes to take photos of nature "up close."

Steele's first job was at the age of 8 when she delivered prescriptions on her bicycle after school for her godfather's pharmacy. She also worked in the office of her parents' business from the age of 10 to 18. She also worked part-time as a photo archivist, legal secretary, marketing writer, proofreader, ad builder/designer, inventory clerk, data entry clerk, mail list manager, accounts receivable clerk, statistical typist, and soldering technician.

On graduation from high school in 1969, Steele received a summer scholarship in intensive French from the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies (now Middlebury Institute of International Studies). She then attended Monterey Peninsula College for a year and a half before she moved to Hayward and continued her college education there. Steele worked part-time as a senior illustrator and copywriter for an advertising agency to pay for her tuition and living expenses.

Steele's parents had hundreds of records. Once again, she followed in their footsteps. Today, her iPOD has more than 2,000 songs from all music genres on it. As a child, she took piano lessons for nine years and can't play a note. In the mid-1970s, Steele co-owned a small recording studio in the San Francisco Bay Area. She produced and co-produced demos, commercials, and corporate soundtracks. From about 1984-1996, she occasionally sang lead vocals with a band at fund-raisers in southern California. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she wrote advertising jingles for an advertising agency. Throughout her life she has written many songs and song lyrics.

Her first article and short story were published in 1973. Steele dropped out of college that year to get married. They moved to Bellflower in southern California and then back to Hayward. After they split, Steele moved to San Francisco, and her first book of poetry, Under A Weeping Sky was published by Wunder Books. Then she moved to Burlingame, where she began working as the creative director for a small book publisher and also co-owned a recording studio. Then she moved back to Monterey before she relocated to southern California to Venice Beach in late 1978.

In 1974, Steele began practicing genealogy. She started with her own family histories, and began practicing professionally in 1983. By 1994, her genealogy business had expanded thanks to the availability of a few early genealogy websites. She then started editing, writing, and publishing illustrated histories for her clients. She specialized in "deep dive" genealogy, often following her clients' roots back as far as a thousand years into the past. For five years, she was a volunteer editor and typesetter for the newsletter of the Swedish-Finn Historical Society.

In 1974, Steele took classes on the Constitution and the law, torts, business law, and two courses in legal writing. In 1983, she began selling pre-printed contract forms for contractors and other small businesses which she sold by mail order through ads in various trade magazines. By 1994, she had converted all 88 of those forms into customizable Word templates and sold them on one of her older websites, now on joellesteele.com.

Steele came from three generations of a family that owned apartment buildings in San Francisco and houses and farms in several areas of northern California. From 1975-1978, she was the resident manager of a 9-unit apartment building in Burlingame, California. From 1984 to 1997, she was a resident manager of an 18-unit building and also managed 188 units (apartments, duplexes, and houses) in the areas of Venice Beach, Santa Monica, and West Los Angeles.

In 1975, while helping a friend identify her family members in old albums, Steele became interested in the use of the ears to identify people in photographs. In San Francisco that year, she met the world-renowned ear expert, Al Iannarelli, the author of Ear Identification. After Iannarelli passed away in 2012, Steele wrote and published The External Ear, a more detailed book on ear identification based on her own experience as a genealogist identifying faces in old photograph albums, and using the wealth of ear photographs available for analysis online. She is also the author of several books on face identification, including Face to Face: Analysis and Comparison of Facial Features to Authenticate Identities of People in Photographs. Steele is a court-certified expert in ear and face identification.

Steele's father was interested in astrology, but he had never been able to do his own because he did not have his birth time. Steele learned astrology from the age of 14. She went on to write three books on the subject, the main one being The Astrological Prediction of Earthquakes. She practiced astrology for most of her life and rectified her father's chart so that he would have a correct birth time.

Steele was interested in handwriting analysis at an early age. In 2001, she wrote Graphology: An Introduction to Handwriting Analysis and Personnel Selection. But she was never really interested in analyzing handwriting for psychological characteristics. Instead, she was interested in detecting forgery, especially in handwritten signatures. She is the author of Sign Here! Detecting Forgery in Handwritten Signatures. Steele is a court-certified expert in handwritten forgery detection.

In 1979, Steele relocated to southern California and worked as the office manager and interior landscaper for a landscape contractor in southern California. By 1983, she co-owned a landscape business; wrote articles for numerous horticultural publications; and consulted and lectured internationally to the landscape trades. She owned two businesses for interior landscapers: an employment referral service and a quality control inspection service. She edited and published several horticultural books for others; and wrote and published eight of her own books for the interior landscape industry, including what later became known as the English & Spanish Guide to Interior Landscape Maintenance. Steele is a court-certified expert in the usual and customary practices in the landscape industry.

In 1980, Steele's first novel, The Rosary Bed, was published by Chalke Press. Two years later, Devil's Garden was published, also by Chalke Press. She managed to recover parts of Devil's Garden from some fragments after her computer caught fire in 2005. She had first tried to find Chalke Press, but no luck. She re-wrote the book in 2025, along with many changes, and a book by her fictitious heroine, Mariah Arden King, called Devil's Garden: An Encyclopaedia of Toxic and Poisonous Plants.

In 1992, Steele’s illustrated Interior Landscape Dictionary was published by Van Nostrand Reinhold (now Wiley). She rewrote the book with more and better items in 2009. In 1992, she wrote Anthropometry and the Human Face in Photographs (now out of print), based on her experience as a genealogist identifying faces in old photograph albums.

In 1983, Steele began teaching adult ed/continuing ed classes in southern California. She also lectured to small businesses and small press publishers and was a marketing expert on a call-in radio show for two years. The first adult ed class she taught was on writing poetry. From that point on, she taught classes in writing, publishing, genealogy, horticulture, small business management, website design, HTML/CSS, cat care, and many other subjects. After moving to Washington state in 2005, she became adjunct faculty at eight colleges. She taught her final class in May 2026.

In 1992 in Rincon de la Vieja, Mexico, Steele married a man with whom she had been in a relationship since 1977. In 2017, she divorced him after being unable to locate him for more than a year. A year after the divorce was final in 2018, a detective found his death certificate in his hometown of Melbourne, Australia.

By 1994, Steele obtained an Associate of Arts degree from Santa Monica College. She also received two degrees in Ornamental Horticulture and in Interior Design. And on August 15, 1994, she created her first website that she still has today: joellesteele.com (although she has had more than 15 other websites over the years).

In 1997, Steele again relocated. This time, back to her home town in Monterey. She returned to editing books and also began editing doctoral theses. It was in 1999 that Steele finally got her college degree through Cal State Hayward's brand new distance learning program -- nothing like distance learning is today!

In 2005, Steele again relocated, this time for good, to Lacey, Washington, where she has remained ever since. She is near Gorham Printing, which prints her perfect bound books, and Graphic Communications that prints her spiral-bound manuals and genealogies. She also began publishing in ebook format and doing digital photo restoration. She became adjunct faculty at several colleges, teaching writing, publishing, genealogy, web design, floral design, horticulture, painting, astrology, cat care, and more. She also developed online classes for colleges and other organizations.

In 2019, Steele began a relationship with a man she had dated a few times in 1975. After living together for five years, they were married in 2023. They live with their three cats in a forested neighborhood.

Steele's first volunteer work was in her late teens helping her mother administer hearing tests for Quota International on the Monterey Peninsula. While a student at Cal State Hayward (now East Bay) during the Vietnam era, she wrote letters home for returning soldiers who were badly injured and being shipped to hospitals throughout the U.S. While in southern California, she edited and published newsletters free of charge for several non-profit organizations. She was active in Consumer Action and Consumers Act Now in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1970s. She volunteered as a procurements director for a non-profit organization and located unwanted/unused items to donate to small non-profit organizations that needed those items. As a writer, Steele has donated many hours to helping dyslexic people decipher written documents, write letters, fill out applications, etc. Since 1980, when she was seriously ill and living in her car on the streets of Los Angeles, she has donated her time and money to helping the homeless.