She is an outspoken advocate for the romance genre and has been the recipient of the Susan Koppelman Award for Feminist Studies.

Jayne Ann Castle was born on March 28, 1948, in Cobb, California, United States.

Immediately after graduation she married Frank Krentz, an engineer, whom she had met at San Jose State.

The couple moved to the Virgin Islands, where Krentz worked for a year as an elementary school librarian, a time she refers to as "an unmitigated career disaster".

[1] Realizing that she enjoyed being a librarian but not the aspects of teaching that working in an elementary school required, Krentz moved into the higher levels of academia, including a stint in the Duke University library system.

[2][3] While working at Duke, Krentz began writing stories her way, combining elements of romance novels with paranormal twists.

[5] The success of these books encouraged Krentz to try to write a real historical romance with a humorous twist, which she released under the pseudonym Amanda Quick.

Released under her maiden name, Jayne Castle, these novels are set far in the future in a world where everyone has a psychic talent and respectable people use marriage agencies instead of choosing their own mates.

To help educate the public about the genre she became the editor of and a contributor to Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance, a non-fiction essay collection that won the prestigious Susan Koppelman Award for Feminist Studies.

[3] Krentz was the inspiration for, and first recipient of, the Romantic Times Jane Austen Award, created to "honor those in the romance community who have significantly impacted our genre".