Arla Jones was born in Great Bend, Kansas in 1960 and graduated from Goodland High School in Osborne, Ks. She started college at Washburn University and after two years transferred to the University of Kansas. She later earned a library degree from the University of Denver and then worked for the New York Public Library in New York City, where she met her future partner Kimberly Kreicker. Kim Kreicker was born in 1959 in Baltimore, Maryland, her family soon thereafter moving to Warsaw, Indiana. She spent some time in high school as an exchange student in Brazil and then studied at Tulane University in New Orleans, La. Thereafter she moved to New York City. Jones got a job at a school in New York, and Kreicker temporarily moved to Chicago to be closer to her father. After a year she returned to New York, moving in with Jones and getting a job teaching English. Later they moved to the Kansas City metro area and then Lawrence, Ks, and have both continued to be involved in education and library work. In the early 1990s Kreicker came out publicly due to a controversy in the school district in which she was working. Throughout their adult lives, both Jones and Kreicker have been active in the Lgbt movement and working toward equality and fighting discrimination.