Linda K. Sienkiewicz (Nerva) grew up south of Cleveland, Ohio, where she enjoyed sitting cross-legged on the front step, folding and stapling manila paper into books she filled with happily-ever-after stories and drawings. She attended Cooper School of Art as a scholarship student and worked in graphics. Years later, she returned to her other love, writing.
Her short stories, poetry, essays and art have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Prairie Schooner, Clackamas Literary Review, Paterson Review, New Ohio Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Permafrost, CALYX, Rattle, The MacGuffin, and others. Her essay, “My Horrible Celebrity Crush,” appears in Idol Talk: Women Writers on the Teenage Infatuation that Changed Their Lives.
Linda’s debut novel, In the Context of Love, was a finalist for multiple awards, including the Hoffer Award and Sarton Women’s Fiction Award. She also won a poetry chapbook award from Heartlands Today. She has four other poetry chapbooks: Postcard of a Naked Man (March Street Press), Dear Jim (Main Street Rag), Security (March Street Press) and Sleepwalker (Finishing Line Press). She holds an M.F.A. from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine.
She wrote and illustrated a children’s picture book titled Gordy and the Ghost Crab, published in 2020 by Writer’s Coffee Bar Press.
Linda works as a volunteer for The Neighborhood House, a non-profit human services organization. Over the years, she has founded an adult ADD support group, conducted journal writing workshops at a domestic violence shelter, taught calligraphy, worked as a conservation picture framing specialist, and participated in Pet-a-Pet therapy by visiting hospitals and nursing homes with her chocolate Lab. She later adopted a lively Welsh Pembroke Corgi that became her own therapy dog of sorts when she lost an adult son, the oldest of three children, in 2011, to suicide.
Linda is a member of Detroit Working Writers, Springfed Arts, Detroit Writers’ Guild, and Women’s Fiction Writers Association. She lives with her husband in southeast Michigan where they spoil their grandchildren and then send them home.
Rochester Writers 