About
Barbara Novack is Writer-in-Residence at Molloy University (Rockville Centre, NY), where she is also a member of the English Department. She founded and hosts Poetry Events and Author Afternoons, two on-campus reading series that bring contemporary poets and writers to a wider audience, and she presents programs and conducts creative writing workshops in the New York metropolitan area. She is author of five poetry collections: Something Like Life, Do Houses Dream?, A Certain Slant of Light, Dancing on the Rim of Light, and her most recent, Heart Like Leaves, a memoir in poetry of love, loss and consolation. She is also author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel J.W. Valentine. Marquis Who's Who has recognized her for her contribution to the arts and honored her with their Lifetime Achievement Award
Featured Work
J.W. Valentine
Summer 1952, and fourteen-year-old J.W. Valentine wishes the world and everyone in it would leave him alone. His life so far has not gone well. His defenses -- anger and cleverness -- have only gotten him in trouble. And now the state has sent him to a farm for rehabilitation, something he is determined to resist. He finds in the nearby town resentment and suspicion and, out on the farm, Mac, a man who may know something of value, and Cassie, the girl who will haunt him for the rest of his life. Amid the distrust, there is discovery, and through it, "J.W. Valentine" tells a moving story of love.
