Biography

MARTHA KIMES grew up in small-town Illinois, small-town Virginia, and small-town Wisconsin. She spent the first 18 years of her life dreaming about living in a place that wasn't so small.

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Martha went off to New York City to attend Columbia Law School. To find out more about that period of her life, you're going to have to pony up and buy her book, Ivy Briefs, which chronicles her law school adventures.

Martha was a practicing lawyer for nine years. She graduated with honors from Columbia Law School in 1997, and was a litigation associate at an elite New York City law firm for several years before finally throwing in the towel, moving her family to Arizona, and sacrificing her giant law firm salary to work as in-house counsel to the Make-A-Wish Foundation of America.

Martha is now a writer living in Phoenix with her husband, Joe, and her two sons, Donovan and Simon. She misses New York desperately, and has concrete plans to return the day after her youngest son goes off to college.

She loves hearing from her readers, so please feel free to contact her - especially if you happen to share Martha's unnatural fondness for beef jerky, impractical shoes, and bad reality TV. Chances are, she'll probably e-mail you back.