From the very beginning and throughout her career, Brenda has been uniquely prepared and situated to represent District 5 in the Arizona House of Representatives, bringing with her a refreshing balance of leadership, rural experience, and old-fashioned horse sense.

Born in Safford Arizona, Brenda is a fifth generation native of rural eastern Arizona. Her pioneer family established Lee’s Ferry on the Colorado River and Lee’s Valley in the White Mountains in the 1800s. Rachel Andora Woolsey, her great-great grandmother rests in the Lebanon cemetery just west of the family’s historic homestead in Artesia where Brenda spent her first 3 years growing up.

When the economic downturn of the early 1950s struck eastern Arizona, Brenda’s family headed west to California where the economy was booming. During her senior year of high school, Brenda was the Homecoming Queen and a varsity cheerleader. Later as a real estate agent, the dynamic real estate market of Orange County California during the mid-1970s nurtured Brenda’s professional growth and gave her valuable insight into business, finance, and more especially, individual constituent needs. By 1977, however, it was her native Arizona that brought Brenda and her family back, and in 1988, she began her career in public service with the City of Safford.

By the mid-1990’s public events drew Brenda into political activism and she became an elected officer of People for the West, a land rights organization engaged in the public policy debate over the Gila Box Wilderness Area. In the later 1990s Brenda went to Washington DC to lobby Congress against the land rights losses contained in the Kyoto Treaty. Since then, Brenda’s public service in eastern Arizona has continued. Interestingly, her most recent trip to Washington found Brenda in the waiting room of Senator Specter’s office for a meeting just moments prior to his now famous announcement changing his political party from Republican to Democrat (the scheduled meeting was subsequently cancelled).

Brenda is a two-term past president of the Graham County Republican Women, former state chairperson for the AzFRW’s Silent Auction, and Region III Director on the State Board of the Arizona Republican Women, a post to which Brenda has been nominated for a second term. During her tenure with the City of Safford, Brenda served on many employee committees. Most recently, Brenda led a group of employees in writing the Vision Statement for the City of Safford and presenting it to the City Council. Brenda is a graduate of the second class of the Dodie Londen Excellence in Public Service Series, an intensive yearlong leadership-training program created to increase the number of women actively involved in elected and appointed public service.

Together with her husband Bruce, Brenda resides in the Rim Rock Country of Payson, Arizona. The couple has two grown daughters and six grandchildren. She has been an active participant in the campaigns of nearly all Republican office holders in eastern Arizona,  and has served as an alternate delegate to the Arizona Republican State Convention in 2008.