Karen Tintori

Karen Tintori (born September 1, 1948) is an Italian-American author of fiction and nonfiction.

Her books cover a wide range of human experience, from the mysteries of the Kabbalah to the lives of Italian American immigrants.

She writes both as a solo author and in collaboration with New York Times best-selling author Jill Gregory.

Tintori was born East Lansing, Michigan.

Her father, Raymond, a World War II veteran and Michigan State University graduate, had married a Sicilian American named Joanne two years earlier against the advice of his first-generation Italian-American mother.

When she was six weeks old, the new family moved out of their trailer and headed west to Detroit.

Tintori was raised in the 1950s and early 1960s, the oldest of three children in a close-knit working-class neighborhood near the predominantly Polish enclave of Hamtramck.

Caught between the values of the old world and a post-war society teeming with change, Tintori's early life was both simple and conflicted.

While she fully embraced her Italian heritage, she questioned some of the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Her liberal parents encouraged her to be inquisitive and fulfill her potential but to be aware that she still lived in a world of limitations.

Tintori was among that first generation of "liberated" women encouraged to obtain a college education.

She has described her transition from salutatorian of a class of 36 at St. Augustine High School to Detroit's Wayne State University in the mid 1960s as life changing:

"I hadn't burned my bra, but I didn't wear it, either. The same mother who held me back from wearing nylons, heels, and my first training bra pretended not to notice. Flower children were in bloom, women friends at college were living in communes or marrying without discarding their surnames. Feminism was a far cry from my grandmother's and mother's paths, but hadn't Mama planted its germs in me when she ordered me never to pretend I wasn't as bright as a boy?"

Tintori majored in journalism and became a stringer for The New York Times.

She joined the student newspaper, The Daily Collegian, as a staff writer just before New Leftists gained control of the paper in 1967 and changed its name to The South End.

While other reporters jumped ship, she stayed on, continuing to write stories free of the political dogma that pervaded the rest of its content.

There, she met and started dating another reporter and future law student, Lawrence Katz, who would later become her husband.

Tintori was acquiring an identity.

These new people and new ideas changed her dramatically, but she was not a rebel.

While she was seriously contemplating conversion to Judaism, she wanted her parents' understanding if not approval.

While she shared the tenets of the new feminism, she looked forward to competing in the two traditional Italian beauty contests scheduled for 1968, her sophomore year.

That year, she became Miss Detroit Fruit Vendors' Association and Miss Columbus Day.

Tintori earned an undergraduate degree in journalism from Wayne State University in 1970.

In 1972, she was married by a Conservative rabbi to Lawrence Katz.

The early years of their marriage were spent establishing professional careers and traveling.

In 1979, Tintori gave birth to the couple's first son, Mitchel, and in 1982, to their second, Steven.

The couple still lives in the same home in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where they raised their now-grown children.

At a mother-toddler class in 1981, she met another young mother, Jill Gregory, already a best-selling romance novelist.

As their children, Mitchel and Rachel, struck up a friendship, so did Tintori and Gregory.

At the urging of her father, Tintori eschewed news journalism for a career in marketing and public relations.

She worked for an advertising agency and then a flowers-by-wire organization, as an assistant editor of its monthly magazine, and for a professional organization associated with the automobile industry.

In the years before the birth of her first son, she was a marketing officer for a financial institution.

When Mitchel was born, she quit to raise him on a full-time basis and never returned to corporate life.

Tintori's friendship with Jill Gregory quickly developed into a professional relationship.

After trying to figure out a sensitive way to answer their children's questions about life and death, Tintori and Gregory decided to write a book designed to answer a wide range of questions children ask about God.

In August, 2019, together with her husband, she attended an immersion Italian language course at Scuola Dante Alighieri Recanati, affiliated with the University of Camerino, obtaining an attestato.

A year after her graduation, Tintori began religious conversion classes.

The day had finally arrived to tell her parents:

"The tears streamed faster as I thought about their sacrifices to send me to Catholic school, about the Jewish tailor, the boss my father credited with giving him a moral upbringing during the five Depression years he spent in his employ. I thought about my long dissatisfaction with Catholicism and about all that I had found in common with my Jewish friends."

With her parents' support, Tintori was converted by a beth din at an Orthodox mikveh at the age of 24.