Andrea grew up in the New York area as the daughter of a Greek American family. Her early love of animals was confined mostly to luring home stray dogs by surreptitiously feeding them and then trying to keep them hidden from her parents. Kostantino and Mary were not keen on dogs!

After taking a creative writing course in high school her life was changed. Working in the school library, she'd cut classes and sneak out with an armful of books, hitchhiking down to Jones Beach even in winter to read and write.

Through a quirk of fate she later moved to the northern Great Lakes and began attending the University of Wisconsin Madison where she completed a PH.D. With academic training in sociology, she compares the excavation of history, people and events to, "discovering diamonds in a place one would never expect, embedded into stories that are yet to be told. It's exhilarating as information and story weave together to form new ways of seeing previously unexamined or unknown things."

She remembers telling a close friend after graduation, "Whew, glad that's over, now I can write fiction and get a dog!"

Currently, Andrea lives in Madison Wisconsin where she is anxiously awaiting the publication of her first novel An Echo Through the Snow, scheduled for release in spring 2012 by Forge Books. Andrea is working on her second novel.