Diane Zinna is the author of THE ALL-NIGHT SUN (Random House, 2020) which was longlisted for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Cabell First Novelist Award. Her craft book on the art of telling our most difficult stories, LETTING GRIEF SPEAK, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

Diane received her MFA from the University of Florida and was the longtime membership director for AWP, The Association of Writers & Writing Programs. There, she created the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program, helping to match more than six hundred writers over twelve seasons. She is also the creator of Grief Writing Sundays, a popular writing class on telling difficult stories that has met since 2020. Diane is the recipient of a Sewanee fellowship and the FairfaxArts grant, and her short work has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. In 2023, she served as the Darden Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA program at Old Dominion University, where the Diane Zinna Prize for Creative Nonfiction is now awarded annually. Her writing has appeared in Brevity, Bellevue Literary Review, Split Lip, and elsewhere. She lives in Fairfax, Virginia, with her husband and daughter.