Just the facts, ma'am. Just the facts. In what seems like another world and was most definitely another century, she studied drama at the High School of Performing Arts in New York City and all kinds of good stuff Swarthmore College. She also spent a year at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism to emerge with a master's degree. She has worked for The Associated Press in Arkansas; Washington, DC; and New York. She has also written for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Inc., (RFE) in Munich, worked as a freelance book editor, done cultural reporting and voice work for European publication. She's fluent in German, breathtakingly disorganized, and sporadically inspired to cook. She enjoys Indian and Thai food for dining, romantic thrillers and detective stories for reading, movies about superheroes, and television programs about desperate housewives and true crime. Her perfect Sunday morning includes a lengthy and lazy browse through The New York Times Online. She loves afternoons at the Met and dreams of weekends in the Hamptons, but is in fact is a real homebody. There's almost always some suitcase standing around half-packed in her home, but it's from her last trip and not in anticipation of any new one. As a writer, she's a monumentally undisciplined procrastinator who growls at her friends when they distract her, but then busily distracts herself. Her major literary influences are the writers of American noir and the film noir of the 1940s -- and the gifted, flamboyant African American artists of the 1920s. She's fascinated by the Harlem Renaissance and the dynamism of the 1920s. Hence, she set her books in the Jazz Age.

Go On Girl! Book Club Author of the Year Award 2002