ELIZA D. ANKUM grew up in the small, and very rural, town of Latham, Alabama back in a time when there were no McDonalds, paved streets, or street lights, and telephones were a luxury.  Eliza's favorite pastime was reading the Encyclopedia Britannica.

When she was 13 years old her parents made a decision that would forever change her life. They moved the family to the west side of Chicago, Illinois. 

Chicago was a world apart from Latham, Alabama.   Everything was different - the way the people dressed, the way they talked, and even the way they moved through their world was different from down home.  

 As might be expected, her rural upbringing made her a target for Chicago's tough inner city kids. How did she cope?  She took to the Library and found new worlds and friends in books.   

Never before had she found such solace.  Latham had been too poor and too isolated to afford such an indulgent thing as a Library.  

After High School, she transferred her love of reading into a job taking on mostly administrative and secretarial jobs.  These jobs gave her another set of skills valuable to all authors, grammar and sentence building. 

It was not until years later, while watching The Oprah Show that she was inspired to try her hand at writing.  First with her riveting autobiography, STALKED! By Voices which she followed with nine highly successful fiction novels.