Miriam Auerbach, author of Dirty Harriet, a Harlequin Mystery

Miriam Auerbach was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia. The first of many changes in her life occurred at age six, when she witnessed tanks rolling past her family’s home during the Soviet occupation of 1968. Shortly thereafter, her family fled to the United States, taking her with them. She grew up in Denver, where she spent her high school and early college years studying diligently to become a particle physicist. However, during a brief stint at Los Alamos National Lab, she began to suspect that building nuclear weapons just might not be the best way to spend her life. Thus, at age twenty she rebelled and spent the next decade living on the fringes of the Harley biker world (in the days before it was overtaken by middle-aged professionals).

In her thirties she returned to semi-conventional life, earning a Ph.D. in social work and becoming a university professor. In this capacity, under the name of Miriam Potocky, she has taught legions of students and written a slew of academic treatises crusading for social justice for the world’s dispossessed. She has found this to be a rewarding career, with the minor exception that one fine day she crashed headfirst into the glass ceiling of the ivory tower. Falling into a funk, she took to her bed to eat chocolates and watch old Dirty Harry movies. She didn’t get Harry’s appeal until she suddenly had a vision of him as a woman, and then it all made sense. Thus her debut novel, Dirty Harriet, was born.

Miriam lives in Boca Raton, Florida with her killer Corgi, Elvira. She continues to profess by day and decompress by night by writing her next Dirty Harriet mystery.