Mary Lou Peters Schram grew up in Ohio and graduated from Bennington College in Vermont where she studied writing with, among others, Howard Nemerov, later to be U.S. Poet Laureate. After a short time of working in New York for TIME Magazine in marketing, she married and moved to California. She entered public relations and advertising in San Francisco and began writing novels. For four years she was Advertising and Promotion Director of KCBS Radio, and more recently wrote an occasional column for The Progressive View in the Rossmoor News.