About Phoebe Conn

Phoebe Jane Conn was born in 1941 in California, and she has always been a reader. She likes to say she owes her writing career to Ricardo Montalbán. She was a teacher, enjoying a leisurely summer, when his television commercial for Silhouette Romances came on — his voice describing romance the way it used to be. She turned to her son, Jeff, and asked whether she could write such a book. His answer was simple: go for it, Mom.

First of all, I dearly love men and romance.

So she did. She gathered an armload of the paperback romances her local library put out for the summer, and rather than skim them she outlined them, studying the characters and the structure before she read a single book on how to write a novel. She treated writing as a career that demanded preparation, and it showed: her first novel sold, and more than thirty followed.

Conn studied art at the University of Arizona and graduated from California State University, Los Angeles with a degree in art history, an elementary teaching credential and, later, a master's in education. She taught for many years before her second career as a novelist began. Her eye for composition never left her work — she builds a book the way a painter builds a canvas, with the hero and heroine at the center of everything.

Whether a Conn novel is historical, contemporary or futuristic, the aim is the same: a hero and heroine complex and charming enough that their love story stays a reader's favorite long after the last page. Her range is wide. She has written Viking captives and frontier angels, near-future adventures, and — as Cinnamon Burke — futuristic romance under a second name. In her later years she added mysteries to the shelf.

The result is a catalogue of more than thirty books across four decades, still read and collected by the fans she calls her long-time readers, and found by new ones every year.