D. B. Borton has published eleven mystery novels in two series, the Cat Caliban series (Berkley, Hilliard and Harris) and the Gilda Liberty series (Fawcett). As an academic writer, she has published work on film, women’s literature, and the supernatural; she is co-author of Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women and Ghost Stories by British and American Women. She has also written for Ms. magazine. D. B. currently teaches writing, film, and literature at Ohio Wesleyan University.

A native Texan, Borton became an ardent admirer of Nancy Drew at a young age. 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, Borton converted a lifetime of passionate reading and late-night movie-watching into a doctorate in English. She discovered that people would pay her to discuss literature and writing, although not much. But because she found young people interesting and entertaining and challenging, she became a college teacher, and has so far survived many generations of college students. Later, during a career crisis, she discovered that people would pay her to tell stories, although even less than they would pay her to discuss stories written by someone else.

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. In her spare time, she gardens, practices aikido, studies languages other than English, and, of course, watches movies and reads.