Award-winning author, Michele VanOrt Cozzens, set aside her journalism career in 1993 and currently divides her time between Tucson, Arizona and the Northwoods of Wisconsin. Her first novel,A Line Between Friends, is winner of the McKenna Publishing Group's fiction contest. It has received excellent reviews and is a best seller for McKenna. Optioned by The Commercial Press in Taiwan, and more recently by the Shanghai Wanyu Culture and Art Company for distribution in Mainland China. Release date for the Chinese language edition is summer, 2009.
It's Not Your Mother's Bridge Club, Michele's second novel, launched in August. It's about a group of women who play the popular dice game BUNKO. Among the women of the Club, you're sure to find your sister, your wife, your friend or neighbor—maybe even your mother. There are eight women in this story. Current statistics show that one in eight women is likely to develop breast cancer in her lifetime. Profits from the sale of this book have been donated to Bunco For Breast Cancer ®.
Michele is originally from Brookfield, Illinois. After years of living in the San Francisco Bay area, where she married "the best thing that ever happened to me," and before landing in Tucson, she and her husband, Mike, left the city to become resort owners, have kids and raise them in the Northwoods of Wisconsin—their own Walden Pond.
Ten years into their new careers and based on the number of times they heard the words: "You're living my dream life," Michele put her writing skills to use to explain this risky yet rewarding move. She tells the story of how they made their lifestyle work in her popular memoir, I'm Living Your Dream Life: The Story of a Northwoods Resort Owner.Anyone interested in starting a new career in the innkeeping business shouldn't do it before reading I'm Living Your Dream Life.
Her second book,The Things I Wish I'd Said,is a collection of newspaper columns she published while working as a newspaper columnist in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1990s. In this very readable anthology, her columns are reprinted and include updated commentary. The critics have called it "entertaining and relatable." Prompted by the death of her mother, Michele believes the collection is a study in perspective.
In addition to being a resort owner and an author, Michele is also a jewelry designer. Her very popular jewelry line, Dream Life Designs, (previously only available at her shop in Wisconsin) is now availabe online. Check out her latest designs: DREAM LIFE DESIGNS JEWELRY.
Michele and Mike Cozzens celebrated their 19th wedding anniversary last October. Their daughters, Willow and Camille, are 14 and 11. She is co-founder of the organization HerBeware, a grassroots effort to educate the public on the subject of herb awareness. She has done television and newspaper interviews and has participated in numerous radio programs discussing the topic, and strongly supports the notion that consumers check with qualified physicians before taking ANY unregulated herbs or dietary supplements. "Just because it's all natural, it doesn't mean it's safe."
Profits from Michele's first three books have been used to support HerBeware.
Michele is originally from Brookfield, Illinois. After years of living in the San Francisco Bay area, where she married "the best thing that ever happened to me," and before landing in Tucson, she and her husband, Mike, left the city to become resort owners, have kids and raise them in the Northwoods of Wisconsin—their own Walden Pond.