Joyce Burns Zeiss

Joyce Burns Zeiss has always wanted to be a writer. After retiring from teaching junior high school, she became a member of Off Campus Writers Workshop in Winnetka, IL. Her experiences with resettling a Chinese Cambodian refugee family in 1979 and her subsequent trips to work in refugee camps in Africa have fueled her interest in the plight of the refugee. Her first novel, OUT OF THE DRAGON'S MOUTH, is based on the true-life experiences of a fellow teacher who fled Viet Nam as an adolescent to cross the South China Sea in the hold of a fishing boat. It was released in March 2015 from FLUX publisher. To learn more, visit her blog at www.joyceburnszeiss.com.  
A graduate of Northwestern University, Joyce also holds an M. A. from DePaul University in English, and a reading specialist degree from National Louis University. She and her husband reside in a suburb of Chicago with their dog, Charcoal. When she isn’t writing, she tutors at-risk children in reading, babysits for her grandchildren, and sneaks away several times a year to travel the world.