About the Author
D.B. Borton lives with two cats in a small town and teaches English at Ohio Wesleyan University. As an academic writer, she has published work on film, women's literature, and the supernatural. She has also written for Ms. magazine.
A native Texan, Borton has lived in the Southwest and Midwest and on the West Coast, where she has planted roses and collected three degrees in English without relinquishing her affection for and reliance on nonstandard dialects. Borton realizes that the language of her first detective, Cat Caliban, may shock and offend some readers. She can only say in her own defense that it shocks her as well. To please her mother, Borton created in her second detective, Gilda Liberty, a person who is more restrained in self-expression. Her mother preferred Cat.
Borton became an ardent admirer of Nancy Drew at a young age. She once acquired a cat in the process of negotiating her way from fish to dogs, and learned that her conception of the Great Chain of Being was seriously flawed. She has lived with--and served--cats ever since. At the age of fourteen, she acquired her own blue roadster, trained on the freeways of Houston and the broad stretches of oil-endowed Texas highway, and began her travels. She also began a lifetime of political activism, working only for political candidates who lost. She left Texas at about the time everyone else arrived.
In graduate school she discovered that she could transform a history of reading and watching late movies into an academic degree. She added considerable range to her culinary skills, since she lived in a town wehre cooking, eating, and basketball were the only entertainment available. It is fair to say that she grew during these years, and has been growing ever since. No heroine of hers will ever be slender, tall, and graceful.
A year following graduate school, she accepted a position as a women's studies adminstrator at a large state university; she survived seven years in this role. In a period of career crisis, she took to writing murder mysteries, though she has thus far resisted the temptation to kill off her personal enemies in fictional form. She is not making any promises about the future.
In her spare time, Borton gardens, throws pots, and studies aikido--all of them with limited success. Borton assumes that these activities, none of them recommended for the spatially challenged, will keep her humble.
