Wendy Lozano
I was a college dropout. At the end of my first semester at Northwestern University, back in the days when female students were locked in the dorm at 9 p.m., I made a rope ladder out of sheets and escaped out the window. I fled to New York to do Off Broadway, ending up working with Dustin Hoffman, among others. In between shows, I supported myself as a puppeteer, a "Beat" poet, and a diamond courier. After several seasons, I went with friends to Mexico and from there to Florence, Italy. But the wet Italian winters depressed me, so I strapped my guitar on the back of a motor scooter, and headed across the Alps to southern Spain. During the next decade, I married a Spanish pop musician, had a daughter, worked as a folk singer in London, and traveled across Europe with the band.
Marriage doesn't always work out. Ten years later, I returned to the United States to find myself a single parent with a high school education and very limited labor market skills. I worked as a Spanish/English interpreter in Chicago and then branched out into folk and cabaret singing before moving to California. Here I sang in several clubs and got full-time work as a cocktail waitress and bartender while I went back to college. It was as a bartender on a military golf course that I wrote "Sweet Abandon." I had long periods when the golfers were out on the course and the bar was empty. I wrote to escape the boredom of my job and emptiness of my days after a life of adventure. Fortunately, going back to college gave me access to a great library, and I learned to love doing historical research. Finally I got enough scholarships to quit my job and go to school full time at the University of California at Irvine, first getting my BA, Magna Cum Laude, and then my Ph.D. in the interdisciplinary Social Sciences, with an emphasis on the sociology of sex and gender.
I always loved writing. "She Who Was King" was written as I was finishing my BA. But in grad school, I realized that my writing had to focus on my academic work, and I began to publish scholarly research under my birth name, Wendy Griffin. I became a professor of women's studies and was one of the first academics to publish in the field of women's spirituality. Today I live in California with my husband, a goldendoodle and a pond full of koi.
When I retired, I was able to return to my first love - writing novels. My academic career gave me the training to be as historically accurate as possible, a fact that I believe enriches my writing and helps bring the stories alive. I hope you feel that way when you read them.
