Mary Wakefield Buxton was born in Vermilion, Ohio and has lived in Virginia since 1959. She is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books and writes a column for the Southside Sentinel, a weekly newspaper in Middlesex County, Virginia. The mother of two adult children, the writer lives in a house on the Rappahannock River in Urbanna with her husband Chip, a prominent estate planning attorney, and their two dogs, Lord and Lady.