I knew I was a writer when I was four years old and wrote a story about an electric horse I wanted to ride around the garden. A love for books and stories has been the foundation of my life, and I’ve never not been a writer. I grew up in Northern California (San Jose area), and attended UCLA as an undergraduate where I thought I wanted to pursue a screenwriting career until I realized I preferred writing prose. I also became captivated by the visual storytelling in art. I majored in Art History and worked at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art before enrolling at UC Riverside for my master’s degree. I transferred to McGill University in Montreal, where I earned my PhD with a dissertation on Primitivism and Nationalism in late-19th and early-20th century French and Russian art.
After my Canadian student visa expired, I moved to Madison, WI where my now-husband was attending graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. Since I’d have been a professional student, if possible, I ended up returning to grad school again for another master’s degree in Library and Information Studies at the UW. I’ve worked as a copyeditor, indexer, and transcriptionist. During that course of study, I got married, had my first child, and focused my writing more seriously on historical romances.
After writing for Grand Central under the name Nina Rowan for a few years, I branched out into self-publishing writing sexy contemporary romances under the name Nina Lane. With my background in both publishing and writing, I’m starting several ventures to bring authors and readers more closely together and to help women foster creative spaces of their own.
