PATRICIA E. CANTERBURY, is a native Sacramentan, holds BA/MA degrees from the California State University in Sacramento. Patricia is the Assistant Executive Officer for the State of California Board for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors and is a political scientist, award-winning poet, award-winning short story writer and novelist.

As a Political Scientist she was a member of the 1985 United Nations Women's Conference in Nairobi, Kenya. Her speech, Women and the Family Farm is part of the permanent United Nations archives. The Secret of St. Gabriel's Tower is her first published novel, and the first of the proposed Poplar Cove Mysteries.

Her great-grandfather, as a free man of color, was a merchant in Sacramento the day that gold was discovered. Patricia won the 1989 Georgia Poetry Chapbook contest for her collection of poetry Shadowdrifters, Images of China. She is married to Richard Canterbury, a short story writer, and they live in Sacramento with their pets: three cats, a red Doberman who thinks he's a cat, two fresh-water aquariums and a vicious parakeet named Spike.

Patricia has been published in numerous poetry journals throughout the United States and is hard at work on the next Poplar Cove Mystery.