Meet the author

Lisa Jensen

Meet Lisa Jensen!

She will speak at the Historical Novel Society Conference at the Desmond Hotel, Albany, New York from 10:30 to 11:30 am, Sunday, June 10. The topic: “Writing Love Scenes: How Much Sex Is too Much?”

Fellow panelists: Diana Gabaldon, Jade Lee, Tasha Alexander, and Chris (C. C.) Humphreys, moderated by Ann Chamberlin.

Congratulations to Lisa Jensen and her husband James Aschbacher for being awarded the Santa Cruz Sentinel's 2005 Gail Rich Awards for helping to make Santa Cruz's arts community unique.

Lisa Jensen has been a film critic for the Santa Cruz weekly Good Times for 25 years as well as reviewing for Cinefantastique, Take One, Movie Collector’s World, and Coast Weekly. She has co-hosted the film review TV program "Talking Movies," hosted the TV show "The Golden Age of Television" and her film reviews have been heard on Santa Cruz area radio stations. For 13 years, Ms. Jensen was a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Both the Chronicle and The Los Angeles Times published her feature articles. Some of her short stories and articles appeared in the popular pirate fanzine, No Quarter Given. With her husband, artist James Carl Aschbacher, Ms. Jensen is a published cartoonist (Good Housekeeping, Saturday Evening Post). They recently completed a mural in downtown Santa Cruz together, where she added something special of her own. She also created a line of wearable art dolls called Weird Sisters. Ms. Jensen has never lived more than a mile away from the ocean.

About The Witch from the Sea, Lisa writes: "As a longtime film critic, my guilty pleasure has always been swashbucklers – adventure, romance and sparkling repartee with some dashing rogue on the high seas. But I‘ve never seen myself in the typical heroine of those movies–some high-born lady flouncing around the deck in her petticoats while the men go off and have all the fun. My idea of a heroine worthy of that dashing rogue would go to sea for the same reasons as a man – for the freedom denied her in the "civilized" world."

The Witch from the Sea is Ms. Jensen’s first novel. An earlier (and substantially different) version was previously published in German by List Verlag, Munich, under the title, Die heimliche Piratin. The Witch from the Sea is Book One of a three part series.