WOW Center and Straw Dog Writers Guild to present author Jacqueline Sheehan!

WOW Center and Straw Dog Writers Guild to present author Jacqueline Sheehan! Westfield on Weekends (WOW) presents bestselling novelist Jacqueline Sheehan as the next featured guest in its Writers Out Loud Guest Lecture Series on Saturday, November 28 at 1 PM at The WOW Center, 105 Elm Street in Westfield’s Downtown Cultural District. The event is free and open to the public. Sheehan will discuss her latest novel, The Camp Muralist, a dual timeline story connecting a 1938 muralist who uncovers Nazi influence at an American youth camp with a modern day chef whose search for identity reveals long buried family secrets. The program includes a reading, conversation, audience Q&A, and book signing. Jacqueline Sheehan, Ph.D., is a fiction writer and essayist. She is also a psychologist. She is a New Englander through and through, but spent twenty years living in the western states of Oregon, California, and New Mexico doing a variety of things, including house painting, freelance photography, journalism, clerking in a health food store, and directing a traveling troupe of high school puppeteers. Primarily a novelist, she also writes essays (Modern Love, The Writer, and Edible Pioneer Valley) travel pieces, and has been a commentator for Public Radio in Western Massachusetts and Albany, NY. Her first novel, The Comet’s Tale, was based on the life of Sojourner Truth. The next two novels, Lost & Found and Now & Then, were New York Times bestsellers. These novels were followed by Picture This, The Center of the World, and The Tiger in the House. Her books have been translated into eight different languages. Jacqueline edited Women Writing in Prison, a compilation from writing workshops with incarcerated women. She is the grateful recipient of writing fellowships at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland and Jentel Arts in Wyoming, and Turkeyland Cove on Martha’s Vineyard. She teaches writing workshops through Writers in Progress in Florence, Grub Street in Boston and at international retreats. The Camp Muralist is her seventh novel. The Writers Out Loud series also hosts monthly Open Mike nights on the Third Thursday of each month, offering writers of all levels a welcoming space to share their work. Copies of the book will be available for purchase. This program is funded in part by grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Westfield Cultural Council, supporting accessible literary and cultural programming for the Greater Westfield community. Westfield on Weekends, a nonprofit organization that helps to define the cultural and creative vitality of the Greater Westfield community through accessible programming that celebrates its many neighbors; Straw Dog Writers Guild is a nonprofit volunteer organization dedicated to the craft and transformative power of writing and serving writers in Hampden and Hampshire Counties; and WhipCity Wordsmiths is a Westfield based writers’ social and support group committed to fostering connection and creativity among local authors.