Barbara Brunetti, who writes as Elena Douglas, was born in Paris, where she spent the first seven years of her life until her parents divorced and her mother remarried. After immigrating to the United States, Barbara and her newly blended family lived in New England. During a summer spent in an isolated cabin in the White Mountains when she was eight, her mother read her a child’s version of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Thus began a lifelong fascination with the legends of ancient Greece. Barbara’s birth parents spent years in a virulent custody battle for her and her older sister, waged across two continents, including an abduction of the girls by their father, who kept them sequestered in France. This is the subject of her upcoming memoir. During those turbulent years, Barbara often escaped into her own world and made up stories and poems, some of which she wrote down. By age twelve, she knew she wanted to be a writer. When she was a teen, the family moved to Berkeley, California. She attended U.C. Berkeley, married, and started a family. She enjoyed a long career teaching middle school and junior high English. During those years novel writing was her passion, but she seldom had enough time to devote to it. She left teaching in order to pursue her writing career. Shadow of Athena is her first published novel. Her other novels are also based on ancient history and legend. She and her husband live in Berkeley, California, and are very involved with their two grown children, four grandchildren, and a variety of grand-pets.