Elaine Stienon grew up in Detroit and began writing fiction at an early age. One of her first short stories appeared in National Scholastic Magazine when she was sixteen years old. She attended the University of Michigan, majoring in English and American literature, and won a Hopwood Award (a prize in creative writing) for a collection of short fiction in her senior year.
Since that time, five of her novels have been published, two by Herald House in Independence, Missouri. She has had short stories published in literary magazines such as Phoenix, South, the Cimarron Review, the Ball State University Forum, The Writer’s Journal, and the Bear River Review. A piece of flash fiction, ‘Skipping School,’ won an award and publication from the Potomac Review.
Children of a Northern Kingdom is the fourth in a series of historical novels dealing with the early Mormons, their efforts to stay together in spite of persecutions, their wanderings, their eventual exodus from Nauvoo, Illinois, their city on the Mississippi, and their dispersion. Two of the novels have won recognition. In Clouds of Fire was a Best Books Award Finalist in 2008, and The Way to the Shining City was a runner-up in the Los Angeles Book Festival in 2011.
The cover artist is Constance van Rolleghem, who studied drawing, art history, and painting restoration at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Her work has appeared in galleries in New York and Brussels. Her art focuses on the way we express ourselves within a language that we cannot master, playing with the accidental or voluntary mistakes of communication and the completely abstract sense of communication as a sound, gesture or word.
The cover art is from a series of micro-images that capture a moment within the fluid layering of papers, paints, and light. It is a product of the most abstract sense of a message, where what appears is the remnant of a physical trace of an action or gesture.
Currently, she is the co-chair of the Museum Access Consortium, an organization promoting diversity and inclusion in cultural institutions. She is also a member of the education advisory board for the Rett Clinic at Montefiore Hospital, and was the co-founder of Blue Sky Girls “Reach for the Top,” an annual worldwide event to raise awareness of Rett Syndrome.
More of her work is featured on her website: www.artance.com.