Author Gerald Grimmett was born August 15, 1942 in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Among a variety of jobs, Mr. Grimmett worked for six months in Antarctica, as a radarman for the United States Navy (where his ship survived the tsunami that followed the 1964 earthquake off the coast of Alaska), as a reporter for The Morning News in Blackfoot, Idaho, as reporter and editor for the The News Examiner in Montpelier, Idaho, and as an information officer for the Idaho Department of Water Resources.

Gerald Grimmett published the poetry collection Last Entries: Poems From the Ice and the comic novel Wives of Short Creek. He is perhaps best known for his novel The Ferry Woman: A Novel of John D. Lee and the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which uses the members of the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints involved in the controversial September 1857 event as a backdrop for the novel. The papers of Gerald Grimmett are housed at Boise State University and contain many unpublished manuscripts.

While Mr. Grimmett and his wife, Cynthia, were living in a home at a Bureau of Land Management campground and working as hosts and maintenance workers, Gerald Grimmett drowned while trying to cross a stream that was normally a trickle of water in a flash flood near St. George, Utah on January 16, 2005. His wife survived the incident.