A college student at the age of fifteen, she studied Arabic and French as well as studio art.  While still in college, Harvey was courted by the NSA and the Army for her budding knowledge of Arabic, but she decided instead to marry a serviceman, move to Germany, and work with the children of military families.  There, she also began her own family and wrote the beginnings of dozens of novels.

Harvey finished her degree upon returning to the States, a degree in psychology at Goucher College, in Baltimore, Maryland.  Her last semester, she was forced to squeeze an additional class into her schedule and opted for Fiction Workshop, taught by literary novelist, Madison Smartt Bell.  Completed that semester were a few short stories and the beginnings of a suspense novel.  Bell told her to let him know if she ever finished it as he thought his agent might like to take a look.  With a year off to study for GREs and apply to graduate school, Harvey did neither.  She finished her first novel instead.  Bell was true to his word, and while his agent was interested, she ultimately passed on the novel, but the second agent he put Harvey in touch with took the manuscript on.  After working together on the piece for a while, Harvey decided it wasn’t ready to go out and she moved on to other projects.

Those new projects led to Harvey winning the 2004 Malice Domestic Grant for her cozy manuscript Extrasensory Deception (then titled Hypothesis for Murder) and gracing the short-list for the British CWA’s Debut Dagger award in 2005 for the beginnings of another suspense novel, Taking the Village.  Harvey finished that novel recently and found a new agent to represent her work.

Currently, Regina Harvey writes full time in Columbia, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore and DC.  She and her husband, a Baltimore City Police commander, are licensed foster/adoptive parents in addition to parenting three birth children.  Harvey still speaks French and Arabic badly.