Diane Simmons

​About Diane 

Diane Simmons is the author of numerous award-winning works of fiction, non-fiction, journalism, and criticism. 

 

A Westerner and former newspaper and magazine reporter in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, Simmons holds a BA in history, an MA in Creative Writing, and a Ph.D. in English literature. She is Professor Emerita at City University of New York and a former Fulbright Fellow to the Czech Republic.

 

She is active with the Sierra Club, Maplewood, NJ Democrats, and the PEN American Center Prison Writing Committee.

 

​

Works in Progress

Just wrapping up: “Kidnappers: A Love Story,” a novel of about 90,000 words, set in the American West during the Great Depression, and against the backdrop of labor radicalism. Based on real characters and events, the story follows three desperate young people —one of them a teenage girl trying to care for a family of twelve—who have been inspired by the Lindbergh kidnapping. They’ve studied the mistakes of previous kidnappers as well as the crime-stopping claims of the new FBI, which they take to be mostly PR.  Despite the widespread poverty of the Depression, there are still ostentatiously wealthy people. But where to find one to kidnap? Then an unhappy young heiress walks by.

 

Researching:  A novel based on the life of an American journalist who, during the 1920 and 30s, delivered the Soviet line to American readers through numerous jauntily-written books and articles.  One of the few women in the field, Liz Stroud—a childhood prodigy, a bit of a “freak” as she called her  lonely, too-tall girlhood self—is, at first, a journalistic success in Moscow.  She helps Trotsky learn English and for a time it seems the two of them may be an item. (It turns out he’s married.)  But though she hews to the party line—papering over such problems as the devastating man-made famine in Ukraine—she is arrested one night and imprisoned as a spy. The charge is ludicrous, the fallout devastating.