Mercedes Ritchie was born in Chicago IL and earned a degree in biology form Purdue University. She married Anthony Lackey in 1972. They divorced in 1990, and two years later she married her current husband, artist Larry Dixon.
Lackey began publishing with ‘‘A Different Kind of Courage’’ in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Free Amazons of Darkover anthology (1985). She has gone on to become one of the field’s most prolific authors,