Carol Dines loves writing about families and friendships. She grew up in Rochester, Minnesota, a city known for the Mayo Clinic and the patients who arrived from all over the world to be cured. One of her favorite places to visit was the medical museum under the Mayo parking lot with its exhibit of objects children had survived swallowing or pushing up their noses: pencils, knives, erasers, shoe laces, bottle caps. Growing up around medicine and illness, she felt from an early age the need to write about her feelings and life experiences, sometimes in diary form, sometimes in poetry. She attended Stanford University where she majored in sociology, hoping to become a family therapist, but two weeks after graduation, she decided to attend the first women’s writer’s conference in Santa Cruz, California. That moment changed her life. She moved back to Minneapolis, Minnesota, to write poems, supporting herself by doing Cuisinart demos in a mall. A year later, she entered graduate school in English at Colorado State University where she found her path as writer and teacher of writing.
Her first novel for young adults, Best Friends Tell The Best Lies, was runner-up for the Delacorte Press Prize. Her second book for young adults, Talk to Me, a collection of short stories, was reviewed in Voya as one of the top ten YA books of the year. Her third book for young adults, The Queen’s Soprano, is an historical novel that takes place in Rome, Italy, where the author lived for eight years. The novel is based on the true story of a talented young woman from a working-class family, who, under the protection of Queen Christina, defied the Pope’s ban on women singing.
Carol Dines also writes for adults. Her new short story collection for adults, This Distance We Call Love, is forthcoming from Orison Book in spring 2021. Her stories have been published in numerous literary journals, including Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Nimrod International, Narrative, Salamander, Worcester Review, Stonecrop, and Willesden Herald. Her work has also appeared in anthologies Somebody’s Speaking My Language (Women’s Voices Press), Voices of the Land (Milkweed), and Love and Lust: An Anthology, (Taylor and O’Neill’s Open To Interpretation, 2014).
She is the recipient of the Judy Blume award and has received Minnesota and Wisconsin Artist Fellowships. For two decades she taught writing to all ages at public schools, universities, and colleges. Ten years ago, she stopped teaching to devote herself full-time to her writing. When she’s not writing, she teaches yoga, paints watercolors, and walks or skis with her standard poodle around Minneapolis’s many lakes. Married to children’s fairy-tale scholar, Jack Zipes, she lives in Minneapolis.
