Michelle's Bio

Michelle Black is the author of six novels of the Victorian West, including the award-winning Never Come Down. Her latest, Séance in Sepia, features real-life feminist firebrand, Victoria Woodhull as its protagonist.

She was born in Kansas and studied anthropology in college, then went on to law school where she graduated with honors. She practiced law in the public and private sectors before moving to Colorado in 1993 where she began to focus on her fiction writing.

For three years, she owned a bookstore in Frisco, Colorado, a small town nestled high in the Colorado Rockies.

While researching her first Eden Murdoch novel, An Uncommon Enemy, she began to study the Cheyenne language and became involved in the movement to save our Native American languages from extinction.

Her company, WinterSun Press, began to publish a Cheyenne language course called "Let's Talk Cheyenne" in a not-for-profit collaboration with a linguist on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana.

She loves to travel and particularly enjoys visiting the “homes and haunts” of her literary heroes, Hemingway’s Key West, the Yorkshire Moors of the Bronte sisters, Jane Austin’s Bath, as well as perennial favorites—Paris, Tokyo, Venice.

Michelle with Stephen Batchelor
in India, 2008

In 2008, she spent several weeks in India on a Buddhist pilgrimage called "In the Footsteps of the Buddha." There she was privileged to study with her favorite Buddhist scholar and teacher, Stephen Batchelor.

The picture at left was taken on that trip while visiting all the major historical sites associated with the life of the Buddha, including Bodhgaya, Rajgir, Vaishali, Kuchinagar, and Sarnath.

Michelle and her husband owned a 10 acre horse farm outside Kansas City for a number of years, but they currently reside in a Victorian home near Boulder, Colorado. 

She loves hearing from readers. They can contact her through her website here.