Jean Victor has written about gardens, design, lifestyle, and travel for a host of publications, including Garden Design, California Home & Design, Gardenista, Wine Country Living, Woman’s Day, Organic Living, Self, and Family Circle. She is a contributing writer in the book, Gardenista (Artisan, 2016), as well as for several books to California’s Wine Country.

After a stint as a television news writer and reporter in central California, she remembered she liked books better and moved to New York, where she worked in the editorial departments of Random House, Warner Books and Access Press/HarperCollins, while writing on the side. When Access Press opened a San Francisco office, she went along, and moved into an old house with an overgrown garden she had visions of tending, though at that point, she hadn’t tended anything green beyond a windowsill of houseplants.

She received her MFA in fiction from the University of San Francisco in 2013. Her recently completed first novel, The Mad Straight Road, weaves together linked narratives set largely in the Mojave Desert, where she grew up. She is currently at work on a new novel that takes place in the much more hospitable clime of Venice, Italy.

She lives just north of San Francisco with her family and their squirrel-obsessed spaniel, Louis, who also likes to hide her gardening gloves.