Penelope B. Grenoble

I came west from a small town in upstate New York at a time when people “Back East” thought Los Angeles was crazy; west to sample this contrariness for myself and verify the New Year’s Day TV images of snowcapped mountains and palm-shaded avenues with the ocean only a stone’s throw away. West to study L.A.’s alternative to Beat-turned-Hippie culture and complete my doctoral dissertation on the Los Angeles Free Press, then to edit and lead the paper to two Los Angeles Press Club Awards. Then to help found the Master’s Degree Program for Professional Writers at Antioch College, moving eventually from politics to health as Director of the Pritikin Research Foundation, then from health to my ultimate destination, nature and the environment, as Director of Communications for the Santa Catalina Island Conservancy. There followed a Fellowship in the Society for Technical Communication for work communicating science and natural history to the lay public and an Annenberg Journalism Fellowship as I continued to investigate the forces that shape Southern California. Along the way I have lectured at California State University Northridge, Long Beach and San Diego as well as at USC and Antioch College, taught seminars in creative writing and counseled both students and adults on putting pen to paper.

It was not until I settled in Malibu that I discovered the strong pull of place and began to incorporate landscape as a dominant character in my writing.