Michelle Black was born in Kansas and studied anthropology in college. She created her first "book," an illustrated survey of ancient Olmec art, as her undergraduate thesis. She went on to law school and graduated with honors. While practicing law, she wrote on a variety of nonfiction topics, most of them related to child advocacy issues. With a grant from the IBM Corporation, she created and designed a booklet called The Child Care Equation, which sought to encourage companies to offer child care as an employee benefit. The booklet won a national service award from the Association of Junior Leagues.

In 1993, she moved to Colorado and began to focus on her fiction writing. For three years, she owned a bookstore in Frisco, Colorado, a small town nestled high in the Colorado Rockies at 9,000 feet where she resided with her husband and two sons. While researching her first Eden Murdoch novel, An Uncommon Enemy, she began to study the Cheyenne language and became involved in the movement to save our Native American languages from extinction. Her company, WinterSun Press, began to publish a Cheyenne language course called "Let's Talk Cheyenne" in a not-for-profit collaboration with a linguist on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana. After four years, the project was so successful it outgrew her small press and was turned over to a larger publishing company.

In 2001, she and her husband moved to the Kansas City area and now live on a rural acreage called Everleaf Ranch where she keeps and rides her quarterhorse, named Solomon, and her thoroughbred, Dazzle. She continues her bookstore online and has renamed it Everleaf Books. It can be found at www.everleafbooks.com.

She is a former member of the board of directors of Women Writing the West, a national organization of writers and other professionals who are writing and promoting the Women's West and is also a member of Sisters in Crime and Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers.