Author Joan Lipinsky Cochran

Weekly Meeting November 20th, 2019

Pictured above is author Joan Lipinsky Cochran, speaker at the Nov. 20 Club meeting.

Ms. Cochran is a former journalist 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. Her food articles have also appeared in the Sun-Sentinel, Moment Magazine, and The Forward, among other publications. A graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, she received her Master’s 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.

In The Yiddish Gangster’s Daughter, a woman’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. It was a Claymore Award and Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award finalist.

Still Missing Beulah: Stories of Blacks and Jews in Mid-Century Miami explores South Florida’s civil rights era through the eyes of a cantankerous Jewish businessman and his more liberal daughter. Brief accounts of key historical events that inform the interlinked short stories provide a concise history of Miami’s dubious past.

When she’s not working on a novel, Joan is testing recipes and writing food columns, playing classical and Irish violin, sailing, bicycling, traveling and reading. A Miami native, she lives in Boca Raton, Florida with her husband and cats.