Headline News
For Immediate Release
Contact: Headline Books, 1-800-570-5951 / 304-789-3001 email: cathy@headlinebooks.com
Subject: New Release-Blood Kin & Other Strangers-Stories of Appalachia
Terra Alta-Headline Books announces the release of its newest title by Vienna, WV resident, Patsy Evans Pittman.
Stories of love, loss, revenge and murder are only the tip of the iceberg to describe some of the best short stories and poems in the marketplace today. In Blood Kin & Other Strangers, Patsy Evans Pittman focuses with deft precision on that most intimate of mysteries—the family. Through stark drama and surprise endings, she has the ability to make her stories personal to each of us. Penned from an Appalachian heritage, Mrs. Pittman’s characters and settings will take you on a journey you won’t easily forget.
“Mrs. Pittman is truly one of the best writers I have seen,” says publisher, Cathy Teets. “These stories will stay with you forever and each one will invoke memories for every reader!”
“As editor of Confluence literary magazine, I read hundreds of stories each year, and Patsy Pittman’s tales glow like emeralds among creek gravel. Characterization is her forte. Long after you turn the last page you’ll remember Cousin Joyce who exacts revenge against the arrogant Godfrey after he leaves her at the altar, grieving Deena and her father who find unexpected hope for the future, and sisters Jonetta and Claudia who allow hate and greed to rule their lives,” writes Wilma Acree, Editor, Confluence, author of About Bee Robbing & Other Things, and Wilma Acree’s Greatest Hits.
Patsy Evans Pittman’s stories and poems were first published in a children’s weekly while she was still in elementary school. Her next publication, however, did not occur until many years later, after a thirty-year career with GMAC.
Since then, her short stories and poems, many of which are included in this collection, have been published in FIRST for Women, Woman’s World and Grit, among others, as well as in several anthologies. Her non-fiction has appeared in Guideposts Books, Cup of Comfort, Ideals, Country Woman, and others.
She has won numerous awards from Writers Digest, West Virginia Writers, Midwest Writers, Alabama Writers Conclave and Barbour County Workshop, and received a 2007 Fellowship in Literature from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts.
Mrs. Pittman and her husband Stanley live in Vienna, West Virginia, within a few miles of her birthplace. Between them, they have six children and fourteen grandchildren.
“I have no desire to write the great American novel,” she says. “It is poems and short stories, lovingly crafted, word after word after word, that break my heart, gladden my soul and keep me awake nights.”
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