Linda Elaine Dennard

Her family describe Linda Elaine Dennard's (Lef Dennard to some) life as adventurous. She will admit that she has ample material for a multitude of novels, and that, driven by curiosity, she has undertaken travel, education and engaged random opportunities to grow from the Idaho backwoods where she started. But as she settles into a creative writing career after years adrift in academia, she is powered by gratitude for the mountains of her youth, the characters disguised as ordinary people at home and in her travels, and the happy and unhappy accidents populating her thoughts. Books have provided, escape, shelter, and mental nourishment since her childhood. A sea chest stored in the ranch attic harbored French and English novels that occupied much of her time growing up. As a result, she is partial to the romantic adventures of Hugo, Dumas and Dickens and all stories seeped in history. More contemporary authors who illuminate the enduring struggle of human beings to do the right thing... and while telling a compelling story also inspire her. Tana French and Cormac McCarthy come to mind.

Having lived six years in Ireland, she is naturally partial to a multitude of evocative Irish writers and was one of six shortlisted for the initial Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award. She has published widely as an academic in chaos theory.... a natural adjunct to her love of nuance. Her literary work has appeared in the Azure Literary Journal and various arts magazines in Ireland. She paid for her doctorate at Virginia Tech as a political journalist.

Read her current works on Amazon… The Thaw of Torin Burns, set in Idaho, and The Unspent Tears of Jonas Bazis set in the Balkans... both true to her love of the complexity of both ordinary and extraordinary lives. She lives in Alabama with her beloved daughter. Her forthcoming novel is Pinto, a suspenseful historical mystery set in Montana.