About The Author
Irene North was born and raised in Middletown, New York. Middletown is about an hour north of New York City, depending on how you drive. Irene grew up one block from the Orange County Fairgrounds. Irene went to college at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where everyone assumed that New York = NYC (This mistake, for some reason, angers Irene greatly). She suffered through many years of stupid questions, such as, “Have you ever seen a tree?” and “Have you ever seen a cow?”
Irene took too many English classes in college for an Anthropology major and feels that her high school English teacher, Ms. Prather, taught her far more than any college class ever did. Of course, her love of writing developed in elementary school where she once wrote a story about a balloon and a woman whose hair got flushed down the toilet. It was pure genius, for an eight year old.
While in college, two professors wanted Irene to submit her poems to The Prairie Schooner. They were 100% sure the poems would be published, but Irene was shy and didn’t want anyone to see them. They remain locked in a closet to this day with the exception of a single poem, Ellis Island, that was published in the anthology, A Sea of Treasures, in 1996.
After college, Irene worked for the University Police Department for a while (where she discovered the magical internets in March, 1993).
She made her first website shortly after Geocities (now dead) appeared. The site was in the Athens area somewhere. It had many, crappy versions and she learned just enough HTML code to be dangerous. Eventually, she ported everything over to a personal, registered website around 1998 and that site has been online ever since. Irene torments her friends and family by filling the site with numerous pictures of her travels around the world, as well as her mundane, everyday life.
Irene moved back and forth between New York and Nebraska several times, with a side year in North Carolina (People really like golf down there). In all that moving, she got married, traveled the world, and returned to Nebraska.
Irene now lives in the Scottsbluff, Nebraska. It’s a bit out of the way, but it’s nice and quiet and she doesn’t have to worry about the hustle and bustle of big cities anymore. She also has a cat, D’Argo, who terrorizes her every day.
While she likes Nebraska, Irene still misses some East Coast things, such as Dunkin’ Donuts’ Bavarian creme donuts, Funny Bones, real pizza (sorry, Papa Murphy’s is far from proper pizza), and Indian food (particularly Chicken Korma). She also misses Shea Stadium and looks forward to the day she can go to CitiField.
Through the course of her many adventures and travels, Irene managed to find time to write a novel called, The Gaven. She’s currently working on two other projects while continuing a regular job in the Gering Public School system and writing a blog called Loss of Privacy. She is also a contributing author to the website, The Daily Censored.
All this keeps her busy and, quite often, she forgets to reply to personal emails. She feels really guilty about it too. Really. She’ll answer your email today. She promises.
