Joan Lipinsky Cochran

Joan Lipinsky Cochran is a former journalist – now a freelance writer– who has written for such publications as Family Circle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Miami Herald, the Palm Beach Post, Florida Design and South Florida Magazine (now Miami Metro). A graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, she received her masters in fine arts from Florida International University in 2008.

Since receiving her MFA, Joan has focused on writing crime-related novels that explore subcultures of American Judaism. She recently completed The Yiddish Gangster’s Daughter, a novel in which a Boca Raton food writer’s life is endangered when she discovers her father was a gangster with the Jewish mafia. The novel explores the precarious and colorful world of the Jewish gangster of 1940s and 1950s New York and Miami while showing how a father’s love and a daughter’s forgiveness can bring redemption to even a hardened criminal. It was one of three 2011 Claymore Dagger Award finalists. .

When she’s not working on a novel, Joan is testing recipes and writing food columns and articles, playing classical and Irish violin, sailing, bicycling and reading.