A Connecticut native, Doretta Wildes lives and works in Middletown, Connecticut. Wildes has spent most of her career as a freelance writer and staff writer for various advertising and design businesses and clients. She studied with Alfred Corn, poet, novelist and playwright, at Connecticut College. While a graduate student at Brown University in 1981, Wildes studied with the late Edwin Honig and with 2009 National Book Award winner Keith Waldrop. Poems by Wildes have appeared in Cimarron Review and Yale Review. Rinse Cycle is her first published novel.