About Jinny Webber

Jinny grew up in Glendale, California, adjoining Los Angeles and Hollywood, a reader from the age of four. She came to the University of California as a seventeen-year old with a ten month old baby and a husband on a football scholarship, back when UCSB still had a football team. In her years as an English major and MA student in literature, she longed to travel, but wasn't able to until she and her husband were sent to the island of Cyprus for a year as Fulbright teachers and spent the following summer camping around Europe. That wanderlust and curiosity about the world has never left her.

During a 33 year career at Santa Barbara City College, Jinny taught literature and writing courses including composition, creative writing, and literature from contemporary poetry and fiction to British and American literature surveys to Shakespeare to World Literature, Homer to Dante, and mythology.

In the 70's she instituted the Contemporary Women Writers course at SBCC, which led to the textbook/anthology published by Houghton Mifflin in 1978, Woman as Writer. She was co-founder of semester long Study Abroad programs for the college and directed and taught in nine of them in Cambridge and London England and in Florence, Italy between 1984 and 2006.

In the spring of 2000 she delivered the annual Faculty Lecture, 'Myth, Magic, and Metamorphosis,' which focused on Shakespeare and Ovid. She has also taught writing courses at Antioch University, Santa Barbara, and literature at Pacific Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, and the Osher Institute of Lifetime Learning, formerly a part of the University of California, Santa Barbara extended learning program and now run by California State University, Channel Islands.

Her PhD in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, emphasized the study of mythology and religion and literature; her dissertation The Prophetic Truth of Doris Lessing: a Study of Canopus in Argos, 1986. An expanded chapter from that work which she delivered in 1997 at the Modern Language Association is published in Spiritual Explorations in the Works of Doris Lessing, Greenwood Press, 1999.

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Her theatrical experience includes playing Titania in an amateur production of Midsummer Night's Dream in the 1980's, wearing a body suit and flowers, and in the 90's productions of As You Like It (Corin the Shepherd) and Taming of the Shrew (the lusty widow), somewhat more modestly dressed. For her sabbatical project in 1998 she stage-managed and served as assistant director of an all-faculty production of As You Like It at SBCC, guest-directed by Jim Edmundson of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

In 2004, she and David Starkey formed 'New Bard Productions' in Santa Barbara, offering two of Starkey's plays at Center Stage Theatre, Soccer Moms and Julianne Caesar. In 2006 she produced and directed his How Red the Fire at SBCC and in 2008 organized a ten-minute play festival at the college featuring plays written by playwriting students including her own play about Queen Margaret, that bitter cursing woman in Shakespeare's Richard III, entitled Immortal Choice.

Her current project is a major publication event of a three-volume series "Shakespearean Actor Trilogy," to be published 2012 through 2013.