Rosina Lippi

Biography

Rosina Lippi writes under her own name and the pen name Sara Donati.

Lippi was born on January 14, 1956 in Chicago. She lived for longer periods in Europe and on the East Coast, attended college in Austria where she also taught school for a year before returning to Chicago to continue her education. Her writer's weblog, Storytellling, includes a series of biographical sketches about her upbringing and family.

Lippi got her undergraduate degree in linguistics at the University of Illinois, Chicago campus, and went on to study at the graduate level at Princeton, where she received both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. Her first academic appointment after receiving her doctorate was at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she taught linguistics and the occasional creative writing course. She was granted tenure and promoted to associate professor in her sixth year at UM, where she was on faculty from 1988-1998. In 1998 she accepted an associate professorship at Western Washington University. In 2000 she resigned her academic post and has been writing full time ever since.

She lives in Bellingham, Washington with her husband and teenage daughter, two dogs and two cats.

Publishing Career Overview

As an academic Lippi published two full length books, two edited volumes and a number of articles in academic journals. She began writing fiction more seriously in 1990, and her first short story, "Letters from Vienna" was published in Glimmer Train Stories in 1992.

Lippi writes across genres. Her contemporary romance novels appear under her own name, while her historical romances have been published under the penname Sara Donati.

In 1998 Lippi's first novel, Homestead, won the PEN/Hemingway award and was short listed for the Orange Prize. Homestead was not marketed as a romance novel. Her second novel, Into the Wilderness, appeared under the penname Sara Donati with Bantam Books and was marketed as historical romance. The fifth novel in the Wilderness series appeared in October 2006. In June of 2006 the contemporary romance Tied to the Tracks (Putnam) was published under her own name.

Lippi keeps a writer's weblog where she discusses matters of research and craft as well as the creative process.

Internet

• Rosina Lippi
• Sara Donati
• Storytellling, Rosina's weblog
• Storytellling discussion forum

Publications

Novels (Rosina Lippi)

• Homestead Houghton-Mifflin, 1998 Mariner Books (softcover); Delphinium Books (hardcover); foreign editions England, Australia, Holland, Germany, Spain, Italy, China. winner of the PEN/Hemingway award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award
• Tied to the Tracks - 2006; Putnam.
• Pajama Jones - forthcoming 2007; Putnam.

Short Stories (Rosina Lippi)

• 2004 "Catalogs" Ploughshares
• 1994 "Katy Marie: Austria 1943" Glimmer Train Stories
• 1994 "What Laura Wanted" Epoch (Cornell University)
• 1993 "Postcards from my Father" Redbook
• 1992 "Letters from Vienna" Glimmer Train Stories

Novels (Sara Donati)

• Into the Wilderness 1998 - Bantam Books paperback 1999.
• Dawn on a Distant Shore 2000 - Bantam Books paperback 2001.
• Lake in the Clouds 2002 - Bantam Books paperback 2003
• Fire Along the Sky 2004 - Bantam Books paperback 2005
• Queen of Swords 2006 - Bantam Books
• Untitled sixth in the series - forthcoming 2009 - Bantam Books

Selected Academic Publications (Rosina Lippi)

• 2000. "Language ideology and language prejudice." Solicited contribution to Language in the USA: Perspectives for the 21st Century. Edward Finegan and John R. Rickford, editors. CUP
• 2000. "That's not my language: The struggle to (re) define African American English." Solicited contribution to Language Ideologies: Critical perspectives on the 0fficial English Movement Roseann Duenas Gonzalez and lldiko Melis, editors.Urbana: NCTE.
• 1997 English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge.
• 1994. Accent, standard language ideology and discriminatory pretext in the courts. Language in Society 23.2., 1 63-1 98