Jennifer Niven's Biography

Jennifer Niven lives in Los Angeles (where her film Velva Jean Learns to Drive won an Emmy Award and she once played the part of Shania Twain in a music video). Even though she's always wanted to be a Charlie's Angel, her true passion is writing, and her first book, The Ice Master, was released in November 2000 and named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the year by Entertainment Weekly. A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writer, Jennifer has ten different publishers in ten separate countries, and the book has been translated into eight languages, including German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Danish, and Icelandic.

Jennifer and The Ice Master have appeared in Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly, Talk, Glamour, The New Yorker, Outside, The New York Times Book Review, The London Daily Mail, The London Times, and Writer's Digest, among others. Dateline NBC, the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel have featured The Ice Master and Jennifer in hour-long documentaries, she and the book have appeared frequently on the BBC, and the book has been the subject of numerous German, Canadian, and British television documentaries. The Ice Master has been nominated for awards by the American Library Association and Book Sense, and received Italy's esteemed Gambrinus Giuseppe Mazzotti Prize for 2002.

Jennifer's second book, Ada Blackjack — an inspiring true story of the woman the press called "the female Robinson Crusoe" — was released in November 2003, was a Book Sense Top Ten Pick, has been optioned for the movies, was recently translated into Chinese, French, and Estonian.

Jennifer’s third book and first novel, Velva Jean Learns to Drive (based on the Emmy Award-winning film of the same name), was released July 2009 by Penguin/Plume. Her fourth book, a memoir —The Aqua-Net Diaries: Big Hair, Big Dreams, Small Town — was published in February 2010 by Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, and was optioned by Warner Brothers as a television series. Jennifer's fifth book, Velva Jean Learns to Fly, was released by Penguin/Plume August 30, 2011.  She is currently working on the third and fourth books in the Velva Jean series.

With her mother, author Penelope Niven, Jennifer has conducted numerous seminars in writing and addressed audiences around the world.