Author to Sign Books in Drury Design June 19th from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. During First Glen Ellyn Book Fair
Author Connie (Corcoran) Wilson will be signing 6 of her most recent book releases within Drury Design from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m. on Saturday, June 19th, as part of the first Glen Ellyn Book Fair. Nearly all of Mrs. Wilson’s books are priced at (approximately) $10, (with the exception of her 80,000 word novel.) Three form a trilogy of true ghost stories, including pictures taken during a 2,800 mile journey along Route 66 in November of 2008 that took the author on the Fort El Reno (Oklahoma) Ghost Tour, the last tour of the Fort’s season.
Connie will also be at Table #164 (Quadrant #2) on Saturday, June 12, from 10 to 2, and on Sunday, June 13th, from 2 to 6 p.m., at Printers Row in Chicago, downtown on Dearborn Street.
Wilson is a long-time writer (54 years) of both nonfiction and fiction, with a teaching career spanning 41 years spent as adjunct faculty at 6 IA/IL colleges. She has published 8 books covering many genres. There’s literally “something for everyone” in her books published by 6 small independent publishers since 2002.
She began writing at age 10 for her hometown (Independence, Iowa) newspaper and continued writing in high school, college and beyond, while studying at Iowa, Berkeley, Northern Illinois University and the University of Chicago..
Connie attended the University of Iowa on a Ferner-Hearst Journalism Scholarship and graduated as an English major with a Journalism minor. She taught writing both to junior high school students and to college students in writing classes at every college in the Illinois/Iowa Quad Cities. She has also interviewed many famous writers for publication, including Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, David Morrell, Anne Perry, William F. Nolan, Frederik Pohl and Joe Hill. Recently, she attended the Hawaii Writers’ Conference and she will be at Table 164 at Printers Row on June 12 and June 13. On May 8th she helped head up the First Annual Quad City Book Fair in Davenport, Iowa.
Wilson’s early writing was primarily for 7 newspapers, including 15 years (1970-1985) spent serving as the film and book critic for the Quad City Times (Davenport, IA) while employed full-time as a teacher at Silvis (IL) Junior High School. In 1987 Connie founded the second Sylvan Learning Center in the state of Iowa (Bettendorf, Iowa) and in 1995, she founded a Prometric Testing Center. She served as CEO of both businesses while also writing humor columns for the Moline (Illinois) Dispatch and raising 2 children with her husband of 43 years, Craig.
Today, she writes regularly for 7 blogs, including Associated Content, which named her its Content Producer of the Year for her political coverage during the 2008 presidential campaign (AC is a Top 50 blog and was recently bought by Yahoo). She also has her own blog, www.WeeklyWilson.com. You can find more information about the author at www.ConnieCWilson.com.
Today, Connie continues to review film and television for www.GetYourGoodNews.com , an online newspaper in the Quad Cities, and she has written for www.blogforiowa.com (archived); www.speakaboutit.com (archived); www.JollyJo.com (second coming stories); and www.helium.com (archived). On March 20th of this year, Connie was named the Writer of the Year by the (Davenport, Iowa) Midwest Writing Center, receiving its David R. Collins Memorial Award.
With the sale of both her businesses in 2002, Connie (Corcoran) Wilson has turned her attention to writing longer works. She has published 6 books since 2002 and 8, total (none of them self-published).
Her most recent release is the third book (Volume III) in a trilogy of true ghost stories set along Route 66, entitled Ghostly Tales of Route 66. (www.GhostlyTalesofRoute66.com). The books are PG-rated, small and amply illustrated, beginning in Chicago with Volume I and moving along the Mother Road as far as Oklahoma. Volume II picks up in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, site of an earlier version of the route, and takes the reader to Arizona. The final volume (Vol. III) goes from Arizona to California and was just released on June 4th.
On May 27th, Connie was at BookExpo America signing copies of her short story collection Hellfire & Damnation (www.HellfireandDamnationtheBook.com), a collection of short stories with the unifying theme of the sins punished at each of the 9 circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno. With an introduction by William F. Nolan, the 15-story collection has been widely praised and is nominated for the Horror Writers’ Association Bram Stoker Award this year.
In 2004, Connie collected her previously published Dispatch humor columns to produce Both Sides Now, a collection of David Sedaris-like humorous essays. In December of 2008 Lachesis Published her first collaborative novel, a romantic sci-fi thriller entitled Out of Time (www.OutofTimetheNovel.com), which was pitched to the producer of the Transformers movies in Burbank, California in June.
By August, ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies) of It Came from the ‘70s: From ‘The Godfather’ to ‘Apocalypse Now’ will be released from a small Rhode Island publisher (The Merry Blacksmith). The book is a 250 page nonfiction compilation of 50 movie reviews Connie wrote for the Quad City Times between 1970 to 1979, with an illustration every 3 pages, major cast, and interactive trivia (“Who did the studio really want to play Rocky in the movie of the same name?” Answers are upside down on the page; no fair cheating.)
As she said of the book, “Each review is like a tiny time capsule; the book could never be written this way today, as the reviews were written when movie classics like The Godfather, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien were new. It might mention that Sally Field was on Johnny Carson that night, talking about Alien, for instance.”
Stop by Drury Designs and get a signed copy of Connie’s books. The ghost book trilogy, if purchased as a set of 3m receives a $5 discount from the individual price of $9.95. Check the blogs above, as video trailers appear there for Hellfire & Damnation and Out of Time.
Since 2004, Connie has also been the owner of a condo in the Central Station District of Chicago (Lakeside on the Park), keeping her in touch with her 14-month old twin granddaughters, who live with her son, Scott and his wife, Jessica, in Bridgeport.