I was born in Canonsburg, Pa. I graduated from Canon-McMillan Senior High School in 1971. I went to Morris Brown College in Atlanta. In my second year I became ill and never returned to school. I began working as a secretary and soon became an Admin. Secretary. I had been an Admin. Secretary for several years. I had worked for very talented people with savant style gifts; those people who could look at a spreadsheet with hundreds of numbers and instantly find the error. These same people could barely spell cat and needed me to compose the simplest of correspondence. It bothered me that I earned a fraction of what they earned. I suddenly decided that I wanted to work for myself, and became a hairdresser. I spent a countless number of hours listening to women vent. Each woman had a story to tell. They had respectable viewpoints, which the men in their lives were too arrogant to hear. I heard them very well. I began to write seriously in the winter 1999-2000.