Author Background
C.Z. Swanson has called Hawaiʻi home for more than twenty years. The landscape, culture, weather, and contradictions of island life—particularly on Kauaʻi’s North Shore—shape the stories she writes. A longtime professional writer with a background in biology, she writes literary thrillers in which place is never simply a backdrop.
Busting Loose, my nonfiction book about cancer survivors reclaiming their lives, received an Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY).
Why Hawaii? Hawaiʻi is more than a beautiful setting. Living here has taught me how quickly beauty and danger can occupy the same place—the ocean that sustains can kill, a perfect morning can become a violent storm, and an island that looks like paradise from a distance is a complicated community when you call it home. Those contrasts make Hawaiʻi a natural setting for the stories I want to tell.
Current & Upcoming