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Ruthanne Lum McCunn is an Eurasian of Chinese
and Scottish descent. Born in 1946 in San Francisco's Chinatown,
she grew up in Hong Kong, where she was educated first in
Chinese and then British schools. In 1962 she returned to
the U.S. to attend college.
Ruthanne began writing seriously when she was thirty. Three
years later, she published her first novel THOUSAND PIECES
OF GOLD, the story of a Chinese American pioneer's experiences
as a slave and free woman in the Pacific Northwest. Acclaimed
as a "stunning biography" by the Los Angeles Times,
THOUSAND PIECES OF GOLD was a Quality Paperback Book Club
Alternate and was made into a film. Her children's picture
book, PIE-BITER, won the Before Columbus Foundation's American
Book Award in 1984, and her account of the world's champion
survivor Poon Lim, published as SOLE SURVIVOR, was a Dolphin
Book Club Alternate and selected as 1985 Best Book, Nonfiction
Adventure by the Southwest Booksellers Association. Choice
Magazine selected her CHINESE AMERICAN PORTRAITS: PERSONAL
HISTORIES 1828-1988 as an Outstanding Academic Book in 1990.
And her novel WOODEN FISH SONGS won the Women's Heritage Museum's
Jeanne Farr McDonnell Award for Best Fiction in 1997. A stage
adaptation of this book enjoyed successful tours of over thirty
colleges, libraries, museums, and community organizations
including the Smithsonian and University of Hawaii.
Ruthanne's most recent novel, THE MOON PEARL, tells the story
of young girls in nineteenth century China who fought and
won a battle for economic and personal independence that changed
the future for thousands of others. It was published in September
2000 by Boston's Beacon Press, and Helen Zia, author of Asian
American Dreams and contributing editor to Ms. Magazine,
has praised the novel as "a stunning and inspiring tale...
.breathtaking in its historical mastery, spellbinding as (McCunn)
captures the triumph of the human spirit."
Now a full-time writer, Ruthanne's work has been translated
into nine languages and published in 16 countries. A former
grade school librarian and teacher, she's also taught at Cornell
University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and
the University of San Francisco. She lives in San Francisco
with her husband, Don, and their two cats.
Primary source material located at www.mccunn.com/bio.html
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John Lescroart (pronounced "less-kwah"), a former
student At College of San Mateo is a big believer in hard
work and single-minded dedication, although he'll acknowledge
that a little luck never hurts. Now a New York Times bestselling
author whose books have been translated into 16 languages
in more than 75 countries, John wrote his first novel in college
and the second one a year after he graduated from Cal Berkeley
in 1970.
The only hitch was that he didn't even try to publish either
of these books until fourteen years later, when finally, at
his wife Lisa's urging, he submitted SON OF HOLMES to New
York publishers—and got two offers, one in hardcover,
within six weeks!
But about six years before that first hardcover publication,
John's ambition to become a working novelist began to take
shape. At that time, as Johnny Capo of Johnny Capo and His
Real Good Band, he'd been performing his own songs for several
years at clubs and honky-tonks in the San Francisco Bay Area.
On his 30th birthday, figuring that if he hadn't made it in
music by then, he never would, he retired from the music business.
He'd been writing all along, and didn't stop now, although
his emphasis changed from music first, prose second, to the
other way around. Within two months of his last musical gig,
he finished a novel, SUNBURN, that drew on his experiences
in Spain. Since John didn't know anyone in the publishing
world, he sent the manuscript to his old high school English
teacher, who was not enthusiastic. Fortunately, the teacher
left the pages on his bedside table, and his wife picked them
up and read them. She loved the book and submitted it in John's
name to The Joseph Henry Jackson Award, given yearly by the
San Francisco Foundation for Best Novel by a California author.
Much to John's astonishment, SUNBURN beat out 280 other entrants,
including INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE, for the prize.
Though SUNBURN wasn't to be published for another four years,
and then only in paperback, the award changed John's approach
to writing. He started to think he might make a living as
an author, something he'd never previously believed possible
for a "regular guy with no connections." He started
paying for his writing habit by working a succession of "day
jobs"—everything from a computer programmer with
the telephone company, to Ad Director of Guitar Player Magazine,
to moving man, house painter, bartender (at the real Little
Shamrock bar in San Francisco), legal secretary, fundraising
executive, and management consultant writing briefs on coal
transportation for the Interstate Commerce Commission!!
John moved to Los Angeles and in the next three years finished
three long novels, the last of them featuring a private investigator
who shared the name Dismas Hardy (and very little else) with
the man who would become John's well-known attorney/hero.
Since he'd gotten SUNBURN published without using a literary
agent (an old friend had shown it to a secretary at Pinnacle
Books in Los Angeles, who bought it), John went on submitting
his work to New York over the transom, receiving many kind
rejection letters, but no offers. Finally he realized that
even if he wasn't fated to become a commercially successful
author, he wanted to be involved in books and literature.
So he enrolled in the Masters Program in Creative Writing
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
It was not to be.
While John and his wife, Lisa Sawyer, were preparing that
summer to move to New England, he was paying bills by typing
technical papers on coal transportation for a consulting firm.
Asked by the boss what he thought of the paper, John commented
that the argument it made wasn't very compelling and that
it wasn't very well-written. His boss challenged him: could
he do it any better? In a week, John re-wrote the 400-page
draft, which went on to win before the ICC. This led to a
"day job" offer that John couldn't refuse. Graduate
school fell by the wayside.
But after a year and a half, even a lucrative day job had
become a burden. Nothing would do for John by now but to write,
but he had little time for writing with his high-paying, career-oriented
job. Lisa suggested taking a look at some of the old manuscripts
and submitting them—she remembered reading and liking
SON OF HOLMES. How about that one? There was one 14-year-old
yellowed and brittle copy of the manuscript left in the world—in
the basement of their best man, Don Matheson's, apartment.
Six weeks later, John had his first hardcover book deal.
Over the next seven years, back in Los Angeles again, John
and Lisa were finally ready to start their family. During
this time, John wrote several screenplays and published three
more books while he held down a job as a word processing supervisor
at a downtown law firm. He rose each day at 5:30 and went
to a room they'd built in their garage, where he wrote four
pages of his latest in two hours. Then he worked his nine-to-five,
ate a bag lunch, and stayed downtown, typing briefs and pleadings
at various other law firms until 10:00 or 11:00 at night.
Finally he was publishing, but he wasn't making a living.
And then in 1989, at the age of forty-one, he took a break
to go body-surfing at Seal Beach. The next day, he lay in
a Pasadena hospital. From the contaminated sea water where
he'd been surfing, he'd contracted spinal meningitis. Doctors
gave him two hours to live.
John now looks back on his 11-day battle with death as the
turning point in his career. He quit the last of his day jobs
to move back to Northern California and to write full-time,
with intense focus and a renewed dedication. The resulting
books, richer in terms of theme and story, found a devoted
readership and propelled him into the elite circle of bestselling
authors - only twenty years to overnight success!!
Primary source material located at www.lescroart.com
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