Dr. Gay Toltl Kinman coordinates Workshops for Writers at California State University, San Bernardino. She has six award nominations for her writing, has published more than one hundred and fifty articles in writing, law enforcement, library, law, political, professional and service organization publications. Kinman has a library degree and a law degree, and worked in the Los Angeles Police Department for ten years. She is a former board member of Sisters in Crime/Los Angeles and an active member of Private Eye Writers of America, Mystery Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, EPIC (Electronically Published Internet Connection), The Dramatists Guild, and the Society of Children's Book Writers. She was a judge for RWA Outreach International Romance Writers' 2001 Award of Excellence Contest for the Unpublished Division, and has been a panelist and moderated panels at Bouchercon, Malice Domestic, Left Coast Crime and EPIC Conferences. Kinman is a scholar for The Center for the Book, a Library of Congress/UCLA Project featuring "Women of Mystery" discussion groups; and was the 2003 Chair of the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award Committee for Best Children's Mystery, and a presenter of the award.

Her play, The Wicked Well, was produced in Cambria, California, and a short story, "Miss Parker and the Cutter Sanborn Tables," published by UglyTown in their anthology A Deadly Dozen: Tales of Murder from Los Angeles, was an Agatha Award nominee. "Neither Tarnished, Nor Afraid" in Murder on Sunset Boulevard was a Top Publications 2002 anthology story. Kinman co-edited the non-fiction anthology, Desserticide II aka Just Desserts and Deathly Advice. Her Gothic novel, Castle Reiner, set on the California coast in 1899, was published by Clocktower Fiction.

Her Alison Leigh Powers, Super Sleuth, middle-reader mystery series—which includes The Secret of the Strange Staircase, The Mystery of the Missing Miniature Books (an Independent E-Book Awards Finalist), The Mystery of the Octagon House (EPPIE Award Winner, Agatha Award Nominee, and an Independent E-Book Award Finalist), The Mystery of the Missing Arabian, and The Secret of the Equestrian Park—currently available in electronic formats, will soon be published in paperback by Amber Quill Press under the title Super Sleuth: Five Alison Leigh Powers Mysteries.