Letitia Sanders was born and grew up in a small town in Georgia where her pets were among her best friends. She followed her intellectual side to study English and creative writing and became Phi Beta Kappa at Sweet Briar College and Emory University.

After the death of her fiancé in Vietnam in 1967, she moved to San Francisco where she began a 23-year career working with computers for IBM. She progressed from programmer on the huge TOPS project, the largest realtime computer system in the world at the time, to becoming an instructor for IBM, traveling around the US, introducing new computers like the PC to IBM personnel and IBM customers.

She married Donn Downing, a retired TIME magazine reporter who had reported from Vietnam. On weekends she rode Arabian horses in the coastal hills with a friend from whom she bought an Arabian colt named Shaman.

Upon retirement from IBM, Letitia completely deserted the computer world to work part-time at the ranch where Shaman was stabled. Her life became centered around horses, and she became a founding member of the California Nevada Arabian Sport Horse Association. Shaman’s ability led her to join the US Dressage Foundation.

More recently, Letitia decided to exercise the writing talents she had studied in college. In a sense, she found herself back where she started, surrounded by animals and their stories.