Born on September 21, 1950 to Ronald E. Reed and Beatrice W. Reed, Ditchoff was raised with two siblings in Lansing and East Lansing, Michigan. She began writing poems and stories at age seven. Ditchoff earned an Associates degree from Lansing Community College while raising three children as a single mother. She received a BA in Communication Arts from Michigan State University (1982), and an MA in English/Creative Writing from Michigan State University (1985). Ditchoff is married to Paul Ditchoff and lives in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, Canada.

In the mid-1980s, Ditchoff worked at WFSL-TV47 in Lansing as head copywriter/creative consultant and then as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at Michigan State University. During this period, her early fiction and poetry was published in various literary magazines..

Ditchoff's first book, Poetry: One, Two, Three, was published by Interact Press, an educational publisher, in 1989, as a guide for teaching poetry in the classroom.

In 1993, Ditchoff was recognized in Who's Who in Writers, Editors & Poets: United States & Canada, 1992-1993 for her significant literary contributions.

Ditchoff's first novel,The Mirror of Monsters and Prodigies, Coffee House Press, 1995, was a semi-fictional oral history of dwarves, giants, conjoined twins, bearded women, and other special people. The book was featured in a segment on NPR’s All Things Considered.

In 2003, Ditchoff’s second novel, Seven Days & Seven Sins, was published by Shaye Areheart Books at Random House. Labeled a modern-day Our Town, the novel explored the subtle tragedies and the hope for redemption tucked deep inside every house in an average suburban neighborhood in Lansing, Michigan.

Ditchoff moved to Liverpool in 2006 and completed her third novel, Mrs. Beast, about the lives of the Grimm's Fairy Tales princesses after they said "I Do".

Mrs. Beast was published by Stay Thirsty Press, a division of Stay Thirsty Media, Inc., in March 2009, first as an eBook on the Amazon Kindle Platform for the Kindle, the iPhone and the iPod touch.

Ditchoff's sequel to Mrs. Beast entitled Princess Beast, a dark and subversive fairy tale coming-of-age story, was published by Stay Thirsty Press in September 2010.

Novels

• Princess Beast, 2010
• Mrs. Beast, 2009
• Seven Days & Seven Sins, 2003
• The Mirror of Monsters and Prodigies, 1995

Non-fiction

• Lexigram Learns America’s Capitals, 1992
• Poetry: One, Two, Three, 1989

Poetry and short fiction

• Lakeside Park Concert, Gargoyle #48, 2005
• Fourteen in I Am Becoming The Woman I Wanted, 1994
• Concert in the Bread Loaf Barn, Whose Woods These Are, 1993
• This Year's Venison in Vital Lines: Contemporary Fiction About Medicine, 1990