Charlotte McPherson is an American who has lived in Turkey since 1979. For her graduate studies at Indiana University she specialized in Uralic Altaic languages and history. She has an M.A. in Anthropology, and during the 1980s conducted extensive research in Turkey and Central Asia among Turkic-speaking peoples. She has lectured in Social Anthropology at Mimar Sinan University, Istanbul, and has served as Vice President of the Turkish-American University Cultural Association. Today Charlotte lives in Istanbul, where she owned and managed a major English-language bookstore for two decades.