Nationality 1: American

Birthdate: 1970

Gina Ochsner was born in 1970 and was adopted as an infant by Dick and Gayle Withnell. She acquired her love of literature as a child from her mother, a substitute English teacher.

Ochsner majored in language arts teaching at George Fox University, in Newberg, Oregon, and began writing short stories as an undergraduate. But during her senior year, in which she taught in a high school, she decided that she wanted to be a writer not a teacher. She graduated in 1992 and enrolled in a master's degree program in English at Iowa State University. After that she returned to the northwest to pursue a master of fine arts degree in creative writing at the University of Oregon.

In 1996, when she was twenty-five years old, Ochsner had a brush with death. After giving birth to her son, Connor, complications caused extensive bleeding, and two...