Mary Burns’ varied writing experience includes more than twenty years in business and agency public relations and communications, including video scripts, radio commercials, annual reports, newsletters and executive speeches.She managed the media coverage of the 1987 visit of Pope John Paul II to San Francisco, and was the producer of a local television morning talk show, Body and Soul.She has run her own consulting business twice, alternating with corporate positions, and is currently pursuing several writing projects.
Her creative fiction writing began with a short story that won a prize at the 2000 Mendocino (California) Coast Writers Conference. Two other short stories garnered first places (see them at www.coffeehousefiction.com and www.jerryjazzmusician.com). She was an invited participant at the 2004 Squaw Valley Community of Writers conference in Lake Tahoe, California. In addition to a literary historical novel titled J-THE WOMAN WHO WROTE THE BIBLE, set for publication in mid-2010 by O-Books Publishers, she has written and published two books so far in a print-on-demand cozy village mystery series, The West Portal Mysteries. The series is about a young woman amateur detective whose two English bulldogs drag her into dangerous situations and then help her solve the mystery. The first two books, The Lucky Dog Lottery and The Tarot Card Murders, are available at all fine internet bookstores.
Ms. Burns was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in the western suburb of LaGrange. She attended Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, where she earned both Bachelors and Masters degrees in English, along with a high school teaching certificate.She left Illinois in 1976 and headed straight to San Francisco, where she now lives with her husband Stuart Gardiner in the West Portal neighborhood.Ms. Burns has a law degree from Golden Gate University, has served as president of her neighborhood association and is active in citywide issues.
