About Julie Hyzy

Growing up in a small southside Chicago neighborhood, Julie Hyzy survived sixteen years of a Catholic education, emerging from Loyola University with a bachelor's degree in business administration and a love of writing fiction.

Along the way, she flipped burgers and sliced onions at a neighborhood hot dog stand, was a singing waitress at an Ice Cream Parlour/Restaurant, acted in several plays, appeared in a couple of television commercials, and crashed a previously all-male fraternity to become one of the first female brothers in Loyola's Chapter of Delta Sigma Pi.

She worked her way up to an officer's position at a small bank on the corner of State and Wacker, where she learned to love the sights and sounds of downtown Chicago. Shortly after the bank was declared insolvent and closed, however, she decided it was time to leave the business world to stay home and raise kids.

Julie's won numerous awards, including those for her science-fiction short stories, "Life's Work" (Pocket Books, Strange New Worlds Volume VII, 2004), which won the Grand Prize, and "Dissident," chosen by a jury led by renowned sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card to appear in the Phobos Anthology, All the Rage This Year.

Julie's first novel, Artistic License, a stand-alone romantic suspense (published by Five Star in 2004) won the Love Is Murder Peoples' Choice Award for Best First Novel. It was subsequently released in both large print and trade paperback. Her next novel, Deadly Blessings (June 2005), is the first in Julie's mystery series featuring Chicago-based reporter Alex St. James.

A former movie reviewer for a Chicago-area newspaper, in her spare time Julie enjoys movies, chocolate, any food that someone else makes, painting with watercolors, and spending time with her family. She is currently working on a novel that she hopes will combine both her love of mystery and suspense with science fiction.