A Kiss of a Different Color

Bettye Griffin

Bettye Griffin loves to make up stories for fun and profit. She wanted to be a writer ever since learning to read in the first grade, when she wondered why her Dick and Jane reader featured no children who looked like her (the only thing black was Spot's spots!). The phrase politically incorrect had not yet been coined, but even at age six Bettye knew something was funky. Because she has always marched to her own drummer, she decided to create her own stories. She wrote her first (unpublished) children's book the summer she turned ten, and just thirty-one short years later, became a published novelist.

Bettye is happy to note that the drawings in those Dick and Jane readers have long since become more representative of a varied population.

A former medical transcriptionist, Bettye is a native of Yonkers, New York. At the moment, she and her husband call the North Chicago suburbs home.

When not writing, Bettye is usually thinking about what she's going to write, is pestering people for authentic information so she doesn't write anything incorrect or is scouring human-interest pieces looking for interesting topics about which to write. She also watches a lot of old movies on the classic movie channel. Bettye enjoys those killer, pull-your-hair-out jigsaw puzzles, the more pieces the better. Every once in a while she will read a book.