Author Biography and Bibliography

I grew up on the West Side of Manhattan when that area was full of European refugees from World War Two. My parents were artists, my toys were paper and colored pencils, and it was assumed that I, too, would be an artist and a proper New York bohemian. By the time I entered College (Barnard, 1961), I knew that I wanted not to paint but to write romantic thrillers set in exciting, exotic, post-colonial "Third World" countries. Eager for firsthand experience, I took the test for President Kennedy's newly announced Peace Corps and was invited to go work in Nigeria for two years.

My group was a bunch of restless liberal-arts grads with no skills, so we were trained to be teachers (everybody needs teachers: the homegrown ones don't want to go back to teach in the sticks once they're certified because they became teachers to get out of the sticks). After teaching first in a rural high school and then in a college in a Provincial capital, I came home with my own Manhattan provincialism knocked out of me forever. Having for some perverse reason written a Western while living in Africa, I set about trying to sell it as my first novel . . . which, fortunately for me, was turned down by every publisher then in the business. Rejected, I took advantage of a new Master of Arts in Teaching program at New York University and wound up working for three great years at the New Lincoln School, a private secondary school at the north end of Central Park.

After that a drug-treatment program at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital hired me away as a curriculum consultant. Our team visited schools with substance abuse problems, trying to get teachers to stop telling the kids stupid lies about drugs so that maybe kids would trust them enough to talk straight to them in turn. In 1969 I married another New Yorker and we moved to New Mexico. He joined the law firm he's been with ever since, and I began writing fiction full-time, between visits from sisters, step-kids, friends touring the Great Southwest, and our own nostalgic trips back to the City.

My first published novel, Walk to the End of the World (1974), was a feminist bombshell and a John W. Campbell Award finalist. It became the first of a series of four books that ended with The Conqueror's Child (published in 1999, winner of the James Tiptree Literary Award) completing a futurist epic of proportions that would have paralyzed me if I had known the scope of it from the beginning. Meanwhile I turned out two unrelated novels (one, The Vampire Tapestry, has been in print since 1981, and its central chapter got me a Nebula Award) and one New Age book; four YA fantasies (including a winner of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award); a near-dozen stories, now published in Stagestruck Vampires and Other Phantasms; assorted articles and book reviews; a play that's been performed on both coasts; and a total revision of the composer-written libretto for Nosferatu, a stage musical; and a memoir, My FatherÕs Ghost.

I'm working now on a fantasy novel, between professional trips (to conventions and to teaching stints at writing workshops) and reading as a judge for awards in my field.Ê For comic relief I indulge in archaeological digs, First Friday lunches with other local authors, travels with my husband, and irregular but determined visits to the gym and the T'ai chi studio.

Come visit my webpage!





Photo by Kyle Zimmerman.