Nan Sanders Pokerwinski

Nan Sanders Pokerwinski is the author of Mango Rash: Coming of Age in the Land of Frangipani and Fanta. Previously, she held the position of science writer at the Detroit Free Press for more than a decade, after which she worked as a science writer for the University of Michigan News Service for fourteen years. In her freelance work, she has been a contributing editor to Health and Alternative Medicine magazines and has written for More, Fitness, Dallas Morning News, and other print and online publications. (Her journalistic work carries the byline Nancy Ross-Flanigan).

A national engineering society once awarded her first place in their writing contest for a piece on potholes. Her work has garnered other awards—from groups as diverse as the Magazine Association of the Southeast and the American Motorcyclist Association—and a Pulitzer nomination.

MANGO RASH won first place in the memoir/nonfiction category of the 2018 Pacific Northwest Writers Association literary awards. In addition, excerpts were finalists for the 2015 and 2017 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards, the 2015 Northern Colorado Writers Top of the Mountain Book Award, and the 2017 New Millennium Writings Literary Awards, and have been published in Colere. Other work has been published in The Prompt, The Bear River Review, and In Celebration of Mothers (anthology). 

When she's not writing, Nan takes photographs, makes collages, and wanders the woods around the West Michigan home she shares with her husband Ray Pokerwinski.