ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff Elzinga was born and raised in Racine, Wisconsin, a blue-collar, manufacturing town on the shore of Lake Michigan. After graduating from St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he worked for three years in Madison, Wisconsin, as an orderly/nursing assistant, while taking classes at the University of Wisconsin. He then moved to New York City and completed the MFA degree in creative writing at Columbia University. While in graduate school, he helped to start the literary journal Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose. He was also chosen by the Mayor’s Office of New York as a management intern, working for a year as an apprentice to an independent film director who developed documentary and narrative films for PBS and short films for Sesame Street.
After three years in New York, Jeff became the writer-in-residence for a state arts program in Wisconsin. During this one-year appointment, he visited public school classrooms and spoke with students about writing and filmmaking. This temporary return to the Midwest then turned into ten additional years of living in Wisconsin after he was hired to teach writing at a small liberal arts college. He also got married and became a parent during this time.
In early 1991, the Elzinga family pulled up stakes, joined the U.S. Foreign Service, and were posted to Africa. Jeff served as the only political and consular officer at the U.S. Embassy in Lilongwe, Malawi, and later as one of several political officers at the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, Tunisia. He received the U.S. State Department’s Superior Honor Award for the work he did in Malawi while that country was transitioning to democracy after 30 years of dictatorship.
The hardest decision their family ever made was to leave the Foreign Service, though in retrospect it was the correct choice. They settled again into small town life in Wisconsin, and for the next twenty years Jeff worked as a college professor at Lakeland University. He also served in administrative positions as Interim Vice-President for Academic Affairs (twice) and acting Dean of the School of Humanities and Fine Arts. Jeff helped to create and directed for its entire seventeen-year run Lakeland’s Malawi Teacher Education Program, through which 75 bachelor or master degrees in education were awarded to teacher trainers from Malawi. He retired from Lakeland in 2018 with the honor of being named Emeritus Professor of Writing.