Gretchen Cassel Eick was born in 1942 in Fairview Park, Ohio to Reverend Samuel and Virginia Cassel. She studied history, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kalamazoo College in 1964, where she studied abroad at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, and a master’s degree from Northwestern University in 1965.

After a few years teaching in newly integrated schools, Eick became a lobbyist for religious and interfaith non-profits in Washington, D.C. For more than a decade she lobbied against the South African apartheid regime and for international peace.

From 1993-1998, Eick worked on her doctorate in American Studies from the University of Kansas. Her dissertation, “The Civil Rights Movement and America’s Heartland: Wichita, KS, 1954-72” became the book Dissent in Wichita: The Civil Rights Movement in the Midwest 1954-72, published in 2001. At the time, the book was the only one to win the Hall Center for the Humanities' Bryon Caldwell Smith Award (2003) by a non-KU teaching faculty member. The first book focused on community studies in the Civil Rights Movement outside the American South, the book has also won the University of Illinois Press Richard Wentworth Award in 2002 for best nonfiction work and the William Rockhill Nelson Award for best nonfiction by a Kansas- or Missouir-based author in 2003.

While in graduate school, Eick began teaching history at Friends University in Wichita, Kansas, where she taught for 20 years.

Eick has been awarded Fulbright Fellowships to Latvia, South Africa, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, where she taught at Dzemal Bijedic University from 2017-2020. She has published multiple fiction and nonfiction books, including Finding Duncan (2015), Maybe Crossings (2015),The Set Up, 1984: Classified Until 2064 (2020), They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story (2020), and Dark Crossings (2022).