C. Leigh Purtill

C. Leigh Purtill was born in Germany but her parents moved back to the United States while she was still a baby. She blames them for her wanderlust and for the fact that all of her stories involve someone traveling somewhere.

With her family (Mom Rosanne, Dad John and Brother Jay), she grew up in several towns in Connecticut and in Pennsylvania. She spent a year at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, then finished her undergraduate degree at Mount Holyoke College in Western Massachusetts. Film school brought her to Boston University and work took her to New York and Los Angeles.

She has visited Bermuda and London, Scotland and Canada, Caracas and Curacao, Grenada and Martinique, and Italy, Italy, Italy! Italy is at the top of Leigh’s favorites list for vacations and she is probably at this very moment planning when she can go back and calculating how much she’ll have to work in order to afford it. And just thinking about that is probably reminding her that she also wants to see Barcelona and Paris and Tokyo and Hong Kong so she should get off her butt and get back to work.

In high school, she was a cheerleader and played on the tennis team but as much fun as those activities were, she discovered she couldn’t major in either of them in college. She found more fun in studying Anthropology and Dance, both of which she loved loved LOVED; somehow she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa when she wasn’t paying attention.

Leigh has studied ballet since she was a little girl and she still takes class several times a week. She hasn’t given up hope that she might one day be a ballerina in a location other than her imagination.

She lives in West Hollywood, California with her husband, Maurice, whom she dragged cross-country to follow her dream.