BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: New Novel from Joanna Biggar!
Alan Squire Publishing is proud to announce Joanna Biggar’s new novel, Melanie’s Song, due to release in Autumn of 2019!
Melanie’s Song is a sequel to the Joanna’s first novel, That Paris Year. In That Paris Year five young women set off from California to spend their junior year abroad at the famous Sorbonne in Paris. Melanie, the titular character of the coming sequel, is initially the shyest of the five travelers in That Paris Year, which makes the decision to follow her in the sequel up and down the California coast during the cultural boom of the 1960s a fascinating one.
Joanna, who is fluent in several languages, has spent much of her time in two places, France and California. The decadence and lucidity of description in both books, the sensual Frenchness of That Paris Year and the vast, sweeping impressionism of the American West in Melanie’s Song, then, is of no surprise. Joanna Biggar has a feeling for place like no other, and specifically a feeling for these places having loved and studied them for as long as she has.
Joanna is a travel writer as well as a poet and novelist. Together with Linda Watanabe McFerrin (who recently announced her own ASP book) they form Wanderland Writers, a group known for their traveling anthologies: Wandering Cornwall, Southern Spain, Paris, Bali, Italy, and many more.
Joanna carved out a place for English in the pantheon of great French writing with That Paris Year, and now she moves on to the stuff of legends, the vast, mythical, much sought after, and still largely uncanonized literature of the American West, with her sights set on Steinbeck, McCarthy, Clarence King, and Mary Hunter Austin. Stay tuned, as this week we celebrate Joanna Biggar, That Paris Year, and Melanie’s Song.
Joanna Biggar is a teacher, writer and traveler whose special places of the heart include the California coast and the South of France. She has degrees in Chinese and French and, as a professional writer for twenty-five years, has written poetry, fiction, personal essays, features, news and travel articles for hundreds of publications including The Washington Post Magazine, Psychology Today, The International Herald Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal.
Her book Travels and Other Poems was published in 1996, and her most recent travel essays have appeared in the Venturing series, whose anthologies include books on France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Costa Rica, and Bali. A novel, That Paris Year, was published by Alan Squire Publishing in 2010. She has taught journalism, creative writing, personal essay and travel writing since 1984 in many venues. She has also taught reading and writing at St. Martin de Porres Middle School and Emiliano Zapata Street Academy in Oakland, California, where she lives. Joanna is a member of the Society of Women Geographers, a group of women explorers founded in 1925. You can find her blog at joannabiggar.org.
