Nina VidaNina Vida's writing career began when her children went off to college and she enrolled in the University Without Walls program at California State University Dominguez Hills to pursue a long-deferred degree in English. One of the requirements of thedegree was a semester of creative writing. Nina, who had never written fiction before, decided to write a story about her thirty-eight-year-old sister's open-heart surgery. The professor said it brought her to tears. Nina's husband had been a Navy journalist in the Korean War, and when he read the story he said he thought Nina had the makings of a writer and should try her hand at a novel. That was in 1980. Lilli Chernofsky is her ninth published novel. She is a native-born Californian, and lives with her husband in Huntington Beach, California. Read More Read Less