Lynn G. Beck

Before Lynn G. Beck was a writer, she was a reader—a voracious reader who would spend early summers with Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys, middle years with Agatha Christie and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and teen years with virtually any work—fiction or nonfiction that captured her fancy.

It was likely this love of reading that led Lynn to choose English as her college major. This same desire and her commitment to teaching led to her pursuit of an M.A. in English from the University of Mississippi. Ironically, in the land of Faulkner and southern culture, she concentrated her graduate work on British literature and concluded her program in 1976 with a thesis on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

For the next three years, she indulged her love of all things English through teaching British literature to high school seniors. The sudden and unexpected death of her husband eventually led to a career shift as she moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to study nursing at Belmont University. Between 1982 and 1985, she worked at various nursing jobs but eventually returned to teaching.

In 1988, Lynn entered a PhD program at Vanderbilt University. While she was enrolled there, she and her mentor completed one book, published in in 1993. Lynn’s dissertation, Reclaiming Educational Administration as a Caring Profession, won the American Educational Research Association’s Division A “Dissertation of the Year” award in 1992 and was published, with few changes, as a book by the same name by Teachers College Press in 1994.

Lynn’s first academic appointment was at UCLA, where she held various administrative and teaching roles. This was followed by two years at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In 1999, Lynn was appointed Dean of the School of Education at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. In 2005, she received a similar appointment at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California.

Lynn’s research has centered on the ethic of care and its role in education, on educational reform, on the preparation of leaders, and—most recently—on education for the health professions. She has authored or co-authored eight books, numerous chapters and articles, and an array of reports and grant proposals.

Lynn retired in 2017 and has since devoted her time to consulting and to work on Mitka’s Secret. In addition to contributing to the writing effort, Lynn has taken a leading role in researching the historical context of the story and to curating a voluminous collection of material including video records, photographs, correspondence, reflections of friends and family, and primary source material.