Joy Passanante at BookPeople

Please join us at BookPeople for the Moscow launch of Joy Passanante's new book, "Through a Long Absence: Words from My Father's Wars". The touching story is the saga of a wartime medical unit, a passionate long-distance love, the making of a surgeon, and first-generation American Italian and Jewish families. More than just a World War II story, the book delves into one man’s past to explore his personal wars: a stint as a child bootlegger, a marriage between newlyweds separated by continents and strained by years apart, and his struggle late in life with his own mind. Told through her father’s eyes—drawing on hundreds of his letters to his beloved wife, his four-volume wartime diary, and his paintings—this is also a daughter’s quest to rediscover her father years later through his own words. A nominee for Foreword's "Best of the Indies" Award! Passanante is the Associate Director of Creative Writing at the University of Idaho. She has been publishing in three genres for five decades. Her work has appeared in various literary journals including The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Shenandoah. Both her collection of stories, "The Art of Absence", and her novel, "My Mother's Lovers", were finalists for several national awards. Her essays have received Shenandoah's Thomas H. Carter Prize and, for The Georgia Review, the Gold Award for Best Profile. She has received Idaho Commission on the Arts Fellowships for poetry and fiction as well as an Idaho Humanities Fellowship for nonfiction.