Ann’s second memoir, THE SWEET PAIN OF BEING ALIVE, is being marketed now. It is an exploration of a secret that turned a happy marriage into tragedy. The reader watches as her husband Terry’s secret peeks through, slowly asserts itself, then takes over and kills him. Along the way, her views on suicide, marriage, sex, right and wrong, good and bad, change. It doesn’t read as a “misery memoir. It’s as much about the happy marriage as its end.
Her first memoir, DARING TO DATE AGAIN (SheWrites Press, 2014) won multiple awards.* It tells the story of what happened when she started to date again at 60. She’s not governed by the rules she knew as a younger woman, but what are the rules? Her adventures take her into strange places and halfway across the world. The world she thought existed was different than what she expected.
The third leg to her memoir trilogy, THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY, pays homage to Henry James’s book of the same name. As a child, Ann, like her friends, had no future ahead of her other than marriage, and when she hasn’t managed to marry by the time her friends were having babies, she left America to see how things were done in other countries and lived for eleven years in Spain, Israel, Italy, and Greece. Like James’s protagonist, Isabel Archer, her trusting American nature proves no match for the more conspiratorial nature of older cultures. She returns home a more seasoned and sophisticated woman.
Her short stories have been published in Entropy, The Opiate, Pulse, Phantasmagoria, Forge, Under the Sun, Ozone Park Journal, Phoebe, The Raven’s Perch, Words & Images, Pedagogy, and Better Than Starbucks; book reviews have appeared in The Literary Review, Midwest Book Review, The Laurel Review, and PANK. Academic work has been published in Pedagogy and on Kindle. Ann has an active blog (www.annandersonevans.com/blog) and a strong social media presence.
Ann has a BA in French/Spanish and an MA in English from New York University, and an MA in Linguistics from Montclair State University, where she taught Freshman English for many years. Everyone had to take the course and she relished engaging with everybody, from book lovers to the socer team and math and science majors. She especially loved teaching the reluctant ones.
Languages have always fascinated her and she speaks six of them: English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Greek.
Ann lives in Vermont and Hoboken, NJ, and has close ties to Austria.
* Independent Publishers Award, NextGeneration Indie Publishers Award, International Book Award (2016)
