Virginia Burns

Virginia has been a professional writer since 1970. She got her start writing articles for the monthly magazine, California’s Health, published by the California Department of Public Health in Berkeley. She was editor of the health department’s employee newsletter until 1974, when she went back to San Francisco State University to complete her bachelor’s degree in creative writing in 1976. Her poems have been published in numerous literary magazines. In 1982, she won first prize in the Hawaii International Film Festival script writing contest for a script entitled “The Last Voyage of Captain Cook.” She founded an organization called the Hawaii Scriptwriters’ Association, hosting monthly workshops and meetings with guest speakers from Hawaii, Asia, and the mainland U.S.

From 1986 to 1993, she was writer/editor/photographer of a quarterly magazine and a monthly employee newsletter for Hawaiian Electric Industries, winning numerous awards from the Public Relations Society of America and the International Association of Business Communicators. In 1993, she joined the U.S. Foreign Service, working overseas in such far-flung places as Yemen, Burma, Jordan, Turkey, and Hong Kong. She retired in 2013 and began writing a romantic historical novel about her grandparents called Bessie Lane.