Ilyan Kei Lavanway is a proliferate yet undiscovered and unheralded Christian author. He served as a full-time missionary for two years in Argentina for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1986-1988. Since 2005, he has written and published over two dozen books of various lengths, ranging from a few pages to almost five-hundred pages. His education includes a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a Master of Science degree in Space Studies from the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks.
Mr. Lavanway is married and has an autistic son who has Down’s syndrome. Mr. Lavanway grew up in Wenatchee and Waterville, Washington State. He is the oldest of nine siblings, seven of whom are living. He spent his high school summers driving wheat trucks and combines during harvest, earning cash to support his first love, the love of flight. He was an avid private pilot in his teens.
Ironically, for all his love of aviation, Mr. Lavanway’s fourteen years in the United States Air Force never landed him a flight crew assignment. Nope. He was kicking it subterranean school in a capsule beneath the North Dakota plains as an ICBM launch officer for his first four years of service, followed by a year of really uninteresting work in a vault, on base. His next two years took him up near the Canadian border, to the giant, phased array space surveillance and early warning radar site outside Cavalier, North Dakota.
Then, he was off to California. Academic assignments filled the final seven years of his military service. By the time he was medically retired from active duty, he had discovered his passion for writing.
Since life has thrown him a few curves that make it impractical for him to return to flying airplanes any time soon, he has poured his heart into the written word.
