Elizabeth
Zinn grew up in Michigan and graduated from the University of Michigan.
She attended the University of Paris as a Fulbright Scholar in classical saxophone, and enjoyed an
academic career in music. Before
retiring, she spent eight years as Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at the University of Arizona.
During its 18-year existence her ensemble, The Sonora Quartet, was internationally acclaimed as one of the
finest of its kind in the world. Their
CD, Treasures, available on
Amazon.com, is widely used as the model for classical saxophone quartet
playing.
Ms. Zinn has
been privileged to study under a number of wonderful writers and teachers: while at the University of Michigan, G.B. Harrison was her professor of
Shakespeare and Marvin Felheim taught her Romantic Literature. At the University of Arizona she studied under M. Scott Momaday
and Joy Harjo, and was able to work intensively with the late Diane Freund,
winner of the Pirate’s Alley/Faulkner Prize, during the last year of Diane’s
life.
As a fiction
writer Ms. Zinn has now completed three novels.
Two of them, Dancer and Heart’s Blood, are set on the
southwestern border and share some of the same characters. In its short story form, Dancer, won an Honorable
Mention in Glimmertrain’s 2010 Short Story Award for New Writers competition, placing it in the top 5% of over a thousand
other works. Heart’s Blood won Honorable
Mention in the Leapfrog Press 2011
Fiction Contest, placing it in the top 3% of entries. It won an Honorable Mention in the 2012 San Francisco Book Festival, as well as a coveted Kirkus starred review. Her third novel, The Happiness Lottery,
is set in Michigan, where she grew up. She has also authored a collection of short
stories, a number of poems, and is hard at work on a fourth novel.
Ms. Zinn lives and writes in
a small town in the mountains of southern Arizona.
Author Photo: (c) Steven Trubitt
Website background photo: (c) Kate Ervin
