About Janis

Award winning author of Sail Cowabunga! A Family’s 10 Years at Sea, Janis Couvreux is a journalist, sailor, mom, grandmom, traveler, and Franco-American, has blogged at the Huffington Post and The Lady Alliance about living bilingually, crossing oceans, backpacking adventures, and raising kids outside the box.

First place winner of the Adult Nonfiction category at the San Francisco Writers Conference 2017, for her vignette Stranger in the Night,  Janis has also been awarded a Readers' Favorite 5-Star review, and one of  Shelf Unbound's 100 Notable Indie Best for 2018 for Sail Cowabunga! She has also had articles published in Luna Luna Magazine, Longreads, and Foliate Oak Literary Magazine.

Formerly a newspaper reporter, freelance journalist, and page layout editor for several Sonoma County, California, and San Francisco Bay Area newspapers and magazines, Janis has covered a wide gamut of topics from local politics and business to varied feature articles on local personalities. She has also written for newspapers in Central Florida, edited newsletters, produced direct marketing publicity materials, and freelanced as a wine and travel writer while residing in Bordeaux, France, for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Vintage Magazine while working in public relations for Bordeaux wines. She has also taught English as a Second Language (ESL) at the university level.

In an earlier lifetime, she lived and sailed for 10 years on a sailboat with her husband and two small boys from France to San Francisco. This is the stuff adventure books are made of, and indeed, she chronicles all this in her debut book, Sail Cowabunga! A Family’s Ten Years at Sea, which began as Vignettes from Cowabunga on this website. Well before she put her story down on paper, both Time and Life magazines featured the Couvreux family’s adventure, mid-voyage, in the 1980s.

She now lives landlocked in Sonoma County in the San Francisco area with her French husband, a dog, a cat, five sheep, and a flock of chickens, but is never far from the next travel adventure.