Joy Passanante
Joy Passanante is the former 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.
Against the backdrop of World War II, Joy Passanante's touching new book, Through a Long Absence: Words from My Father's Wars, is the saga of a wartime medical unit, a passionate long-distance love, the making of a surgeon, and two first-generation American families.
Lake Rose Davis is the only child of former hippies who settled in a small Idaho mill town in the late 1960s. Her parents' eccentric lifestyle makes Lake an outcast among the children of the town, and the unspoken tensions among the adults of her parents' social universe puzzle and disturb her.