Bari Wood

Wood was born on December 31, 1936, in Jacksonville, Illinois, to Israel S. Prosterman and Gertrude Ritman. She grew up in and around Chicago, and graduated from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois with a degree in English. She moved to New York in 1957, where she first worked in the library of the American Cancer Society, later as editor of the society's publication, CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians^[1] and of the medical journal Drug Therapy. In the early 1970s, she began writing fiction.

In New York she fell in love with and married Dr. Gilbert Congdon Wood (1915–2000), a biologist for the American Cancer Society. In 1981 they moved to a farmhouse in Ridgefield, Connecticut.^[2] In 2008, she married Dennis Preston Kazee and moved to Lansing, Michigan.

Wood wrote her first novel, The Killing Gift, in 1975. It won the Putnam Prize for high-quality novels.^[3] It was followed by Twins, co-written with Jack Geasland in 1977. In 1988, the novel was adapted into a film under the title Dead Ringers with Jeremy Irons in the eponymous lead roles. Her 1993 novel Doll's Eyes was adapted into a film titled In Dreams in 1999.