Hello, my friends. I hope you are all well.
I know it’s been a while, and I apologize for that. I also apologize that my podcasts have stalled. They will be back, but the semester has gotten the better of me. Three more weeks, and we can close the books on the Spring 2022 semester! I know the students are happy.
Because I’ve been absent for so long, I have a lot of cool news to share with you today!
First, I was honored to receive the Distinguished Teaching Fellow Award at the Eastern Communication Association Annual Convention! It was such an honor to represent Stevenson University, and I was so touched to hear what nominees wrote in their letters of nomination. A special thanks to my colleague, Dr. Leeanne Bell McManus and several others, for putting my name forward for the award. Leeanne also received the Ecroyd Excellence in Teaching Award, and I’m so proud of her. We had a great time at the convention in Philadelphia, and even got to explore Philadelphia a little bit. We also toured Widener University’s Communication Building to see what they had going on.
My husband joined me in Philly, and we visited the Eastern State Penitentiary. If you enjoyed touring Alcatraz in San Francisco, you will also enjoy touring this former prison. Left as a relic, it housed criminals of all sorts, including Al Capone for a year. While not as dark and ominous as Alcatraz, it was still nonetheless haunting. I learned a lot about prisons back in the day, and will be using some of that knowledge to help inform Rosa, a character I am writing in my work-in-progress called Dodging Love. She is a mafia boss who finds herself serving time in jail; the protagonist is a journalist who has to cover her story. I’m looking forward to finishing the first draft of this story this summer.
Also, after much ado, I have decided once again to self-publish The Letters in the Books, my current novel that has been complete for over a year. I had started to shop it out, but then decided to pull that back. I am quite happy being an indie author, and would love to spend more time working on my writing career. It’s such a passion of mine, I’m looking forward to pouring my heart and soul into it this summer. The proof of the novel will be in my hands tomorrow (yippee!), and I am looking for ARC readers at the moment. Just one more read through, and I’ll get it into some people’s hands.
Finally, tonight I will be attending the Maryland Bards Poetry event in Annapolis, where I will be reading my poem Cracking, A Sonnet, that was selected for the anthology. I have never shared my poetry orally, so this will be interesting. Congratulations to all the poets who were selected to be included in the Maryland Bards Anthology!
That’s all for now. Have a wonderful weekend!
Stephanie Verni is the author of contemporary fiction, all available at Amazon.com and BN.com, as well as at Park Books in Severna Park and Bethany Beach Books in Bethany Beach, DE.
