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Elaine Burr Stienon grew up in and around Detroit, Michigan. She attended the University of Michigan, where she majored in English and American literature. In her senior year she won a Hopwood award (a prize in creative writing) for a collection of short stories.

As a young person, she spent summers in northern Michigan—Hemingway country—and much of her fiction is centered there. From her father, a physician, and her mother, a botanist, she acquired a lively interest in the natural world and a compassion for all living things. Nature, wild creatures, and concern for the environment play an important part in her writing.

Music is also a vital part of her life; she has studied and played flute from an early age, and has worked as a professional musician in the Los Angeles area. The joys of making music and the problems of musicians figure prominently in many of her short stories.

From her early childhood she had the dream of writing fiction, and has worked seriously as a writer most of her life. Her first published story appeared in a nationally-distributed magazine called Literary Cavalcade when she was sixteen. Her fiction has been published in literary magazines such as Phoenix, South, Ball State University Forum, Cimarron Review, The Writers’ Journal, and The Bear River Review.

Her novels include LIGHTNING IN THE FOG and UTAH SPRING, published by Herald House of Independence, Missouri. Historical novels about early Mormon events are THE LIGHT OF THE MORNING, published by Ensign Publishing House, and IN CLOUDS OF FIRE, a finalist in the Best Books Awards for the year 2008 in the category of religious fiction. The third in the series, THE WAY TO THE SHINING CITY, won an honorable mention in the 2012 Los Angeles Book Festival in the field of general fiction. The fourth in the series, THE CHILDREN OF A NORTHERN KINGDOM, is now available.

In 2011 she won The Potomac Review Flash Fiction Contest. The winning entry, ‘Skipping School,’ was published in the Spring, 2012 issue of The Potomac Review.

She currently lives and writes in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Ensign Publishing House

Books by Elaine Stienon

© 2017 Ensign Publishing House