About Tonja

Tonja Evetts Weimer, author of Thriving After Divorce: Transforming your life when a relationship ends, has an M.A. in Human Development, is a Master Certified Single's Relationship Coach and a Certified Life Coach with the International Coach Federation (ICF).  She has been a keynote speaker in almost every U.S. state, as well as in Europe and India.  She has appeared on numerous regional and national television interview shows, including CNN's ShowBiz Today, and was the online Dating Expert for the USA/NBC TV Network mini-series, The Starter Wife.  Tonja is also an award-winning newspaper columnist, writing a weekly dating column called Savvy Dating, carried by newspapers in hundreds of cities across America and Canada.  She has been published in New Woman, Hope, Grand, and House Beautiful Magazines.  Her columns and articles have won three Matrix Awards.

Tonja grew up outside of Bakersfield, CA, the daughter of cowboys who migrated from the Oklahoma dustbowl.  Her father was a renowned cattle auctioneer; her mother competed in the Grand National Rodeo at 83 years old.  Tonja studied atop haystacks and tractors to eventually earn a scholarship that led to her Master's Degree in Human Development.  She worked with children in Harlem in the sixties, and won a grant with Easter Seals to work with developmentally disabled children in Pittsburgh in the eighties.

Thriving After Divorce marks Weimer's first book since her career change in 2002 from a children's author and educator to a relationship coach and dating expert.  After 22 awards for her 7 books, 6 albums and 2 videos for children, including her album, Space Songs for Children, which was taken aboard flights of the U.S. Space Shuttle, Tonja suffered Spasmodic Dysphonia, a condition that left her unable to sing and perform to the thousands of children that packed auditoriums to see her nationwide.  With over thirty years of her career behind her, most people would have viewed such an incident as a sign to retire.  Not Tonja.  Instead, she says the opportunity allowed her to "find a new voice."

Tonja's life is colorful and her stories, inspirational.  These qualities, from an author who is the very model of self-reinvention, are what make Thriving After Divorce a success, and what makes Tonja a sought-after guest and expert on the topic of relationships, dating, divorce and renewal.