Sheri Dew: Living the unexpected life

"I get e-mails from her at 3 in the morning," says her secretary, Nada.

Dew wrote the biography of LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley mostly between the hours of 3 a.m. and 7 a.m. "People ask me, 'Is it hard to write a biography?' I say, 'No, I did it in my sleep,' " she says, smiling at her joke.

During the day she hustles from one meeting to the next, dashing back and forth across South Temple between her office at Deseret Book and her office at LDS Church headquarters. When she isn't doing that, she's traveling the world as a representative of her church.

"I'm out of control," she confesses.

Dew's frenetic schedule makes her notoriously difficult to contact.

True story: Gladys Knight, the singer and LDS convert, was scheduled to appear on a celebrity edition of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." Knight asked Dew to be one of her "lifelines," and she agreed. When the show tried to call Dew, they couldn't reach her.

"People ask me what's the secret to my success," says Dew. "I tell them I have two jobs, and I'm not doing either one well. I'm failing at both jobs. That's the secret. It's impossible to do both well. It feels that way to me. I feel like I'm always letting someone down."

As successful as her career has been, it is a total accident. Everyone she knew left BYU with a degree and a husband, and she expected to be one of them. When she wasn't, she was caught off guard.

"I looked around and thought, 'Now what?' " she says. "It had never occurred to me that I would need to support myself. I had no expectations about a career."

After earning a degree in history with an emphasis in American religious history, she was hired as the "lowest editor on the rung" at Bookcraft, an LDS-oriented publishing house, and got hooked by the publishing business.

"It felt to me like it had a great purpose," she says. "You could do good; you could make a difference. From the time I was a little girl I would go jogging on these country roads wondering what the church was like in the rest of the world. So when I started working at Bookcraft it felt like a way to help get the message of truth out."

She stayed at Bookcraft four years, then became a staff writer and editor of This People — an LDS magazine — for seven years. She has been at Deseret Book for nearly 15 years. Five years ago she was called to serve in the LDS Relief Society presidency. Over the years she also has written biographies for two church presidents and former Miss America Sharlene Wells and penned her recently released "No Doubt About It," even though she confesses, "I'd rather have a root canal than write."