Florence “Feenie” Ziner, author and professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut, died last month at the age of 90.
Ziner was a native of Brooklyn, New York, and did undergraduate work at Brooklyn College. She earned a master’s degree in social work at Columbia University. After working as a social worker in Chicago, she began a successful new career writing children’s books. In 1966, she published her first adult book, A Full House. Her later works include Bluenose, Queen of the Grand Banks and Within This Wilderness.
She served as the children’s book reviewer for The New York Times and the Montreal Star. Before joining the faculty at the University of Connecticut in the mid-1970s, she taught at the New School for Social Research and the State University of New York at Purchase. She retired from her teaching post at the University of Connecticut in 1994.