I grew up in the small town of Elgin, Illinois.  My younger brother and I spent every summer participating in the public library's summer reading program.  (He usually won for the most read and I usually came in second.)  It was a conservative time -- I needed a note from my parents to read "Catcher in the Rye" in Honors English in 11th grade. I majored in journalism at MIchigan State University both because I wanted to be a journalist and because I could take more literature courses with that major than I could with an English major.  I got to spend the summer after freshman year at Harvard Summer School, where I had two amazing English poetry classes and where I got so many credtis transferred back to MSU that I was able to graduate college in three years by going to school the following two summers. The whole time I was at MSU I worked on the States News, the college's award-winning five-day-a-week newspaper.  It's here I met my husband and started on the path that led me, in the spring of 1970 during the Vietnam War, to be a new Mrs. Lieuteuant -- the experiences of which form the source of my novel MRS. LIEUTENEANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL. I continued to read extensively and, in 1972, when I became a journalist in Philadelphia and a member of a women's consciousness-raising group, two books particularly influenced me:  Doris Lessing's "The Golden Notebook" and Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying."  I also taught newswriting and copyediting at Temple University in Philadelphia. In 1980, right after earning an M.B.A. from The Wharton School, I moved with my husband to Los Angeles.  A few years later I founded the Los Angeles Chapter of Sisters in Crime. My current reading is eclectic -- both fiction and nonfiction -- and usually several books at once so that I have different books on hand for whatever mood I'm in at the moment.  My husband, my two adult daughters, and I are all constantly buying books.  I figure I must be one of Amazon's best customers!   Caption for above photo:   Phyllis Zimbler and Mitchell Miller at the Coronation Ball at Michigan State University on Saturday, November 18, 1967, sponsored by the Cadet Officers Club and the Arnold Air Society.  

MRS. LIEUTENANT was a semi-finalist in the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.