Deborah Baker is a biographer and essayist. She is married to the writer Amitav Ghosh and lives in Brooklyn, Calcutta, and Goa.[1] She is the author of A Blue Hand: The Beats in India a biography on Allen Ginsberg which focuses on his time in India[2] and of Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 1994.[3] She also writes for the Los Angeles Times.[4] Her latest book, The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (2011), is a biography of Maryam Jameelah (born Margaret Marcus) a Jewish woman from New York who converts to Islam and becomes a fundamentalist writer based in Pakistan.[5]