Kinnikinnik, Ann H. Zwinger, Colored Pencil on Paper
Artist Biography
Ann Zwinger, author and naturalist, was born March 12, 1925 in Muncie, Indiana. Graduating from Wellesley College, she was working on a doctorate at Harvard when she met and married Herman Zwinger, an Air Force pilot. They settled in Colorado Springs with their three daughters in 1960.
Ann was a naturalist at heart, finding and sketching numerous plants and describing places she travelled. When she was “in the field”, her descriptions of where and when she saw and drew the plants around her were complete. One observer remarked that her writing was “science in the hands of a poet”.
In 1969 Ann was introduced to Marie Rodell, Rachel Carson’s literary agent. When asked what she would “most love to do”, she replied “write about our land”. This became Ann’s first book, Beyond the Aspen Grove, published in 1970. Over the next thirty-one years, Ann published twenty more books, becoming a specialist on Western rivers. By walking the canyons and riding the rivers, she learned the land of which she wrote, becoming an “artist of the written word.”
Zwinger was nominated for a National Book Award in Science in 1973, the Western Arts Federation Award for nonfiction in 1995, and the “Spirit of the West” Award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association in 2001, demonstrating how her writing inspired and pleased so many different people and fields of study.
Ann was an outstanding role model to young people across the country, teaching at Colorado College, Carleton College, and Smith College among others, encouraging her students to explore the countryside and write about what they saw and experienced.
Ann was proud of the twenty years she served on the board of American Electric Power Company from 1977 through 1997. She was the first woman to serve on a major utility board, and it was the largest private utility in the U.S. She co-founded the Utility Women’s Conference in 1984, as a Chair and member through 1997.
Ann Zwinger died on August 30, 2014 in Portland, Oregon.
