Ruth Day Burtnick was born on 27 April 1942 in Lexington, Kentucky, USA, the daughter of Lester Leon Burtnick, a psychiatrist, and Beverly Miller Burtnick, a middle-school science teacher. She was raised in Washington D.C., and obtained a B.A. in American Thought and Civilization from George Washington University and an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Maryland. In 30 June 1963, she married Norman S. Glick, a mathematician for the Defense Department. They have two children: Elissa, a librarian, and Ethan, a Foreign Service Officer. Ruth and her friend Nancy Baggett began to write magazine articles. In this time, Ruth's daughter was a preschooler wanted a dollhouse. A family friend built it and Ruth she began designing miniature furniture. They decided to sold a book on making dollhouse furniture. They wrote two books together, and Ruth a third book alone. With Nancy, she also wrote some cookbooks focusing on healthy eating. Ruth first fiction book was a collaborative effort with three friends Eileen Buckholtz, Louise Titchener, and Carolyn Males, the result was a romance novel Love is Elected, published in 1982 by Silhouette under the pseudonym Alyssa Howard, their first work "Love is Elected" was nominee for Romantic Times Best Romance. Her first alone book was Invasion of the Blue Lights, a young adult's novel published in 1983. In the 1980s, she wrote under her married name young adult's fiction with Eileen Buckholtz, with whom she also wrote romance novels under the pseudonyms: Amanda Lee, Samantha Chase and Rebecca York. With Louise Titchener, she wrote under the pseudonym: Alexis Hill, Alexis Hill Jordan, and Tess Marlowe. A late 1990s, her friend Eileen Buckholtz decided to stop writing under the pseudonym Rebecca York, and Ruth continued alone. She has continued to write novels of suspense and now also paranormal novels. Ruth lives with her husband in Columbia, Maryland, their children have grown, and they are grandparents of two boys, Jesse and Leo.