CROSSINGS

About the Book

Crossings is a collection of short stories that began years ago with scribblings on Post-it notes and journals, all set aside while the author was engulfed in a teaching career, a poetry group with university colleagues and writing for the academic marketplace. Resurfaced, completed and revised, the stories grew out of her favorite words: what if, words that plunged her into a world of the paranormal and all manner of phenomenon that, but for the courage of a cadre of researchers and experiencers, often rest outside the realm of science and too often the object of ridicule and indifference. Beginning with, “The Crossing,” Boston is home to the characters in each tale, a city with a long and varied history of American experience. The first-person “telling” by the central characters intimately connects each narrator with the reader in these tales of the unexpected and unexplained, a journey behind the curtain where curiosity and experience lay.

About the Author

Dr. Marsha Carow Markman earned a Ph.D. in English Education from the University of Maryland, College Park. She taught at the George Washington University and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. before returning to her California home. She is currently Professor Emerita of California Lutheran University’s English Department, where she directed the Writing Center; the Freshman Writing program; taught a variety of courses, including, “Children’s Literature,” “The Holocaust through Literature and Film” and cross-curriculum courses with professors in the departments of Music, History, Drama and Philosophy. Dr. Markman’s publications include: The American Journey (Volumes 1 and 2) and Writing Women’s Lives, with Drs. Susan Corey and Jonathan Boe. (The latter book includes her, “Breast Cancer Diary”). If We Dance . . . A Collection of Poems, is a collaborative effort with CLU faculty. She edited and wrote the “Introduction” to Piri Piroska Bodnar’s Holocaust memoir, Out of the Shadows; a review in The Historian (Vol. 71) of Martha Tomhave Blaufelt’s, The Work of the Heart; “Teaching the Holocaust through Literature” in New Perspectives on the Holocaust; articles with Dr. Gordon Leighton in, College and Research Libraries News and Research Strategies; and, Do You Know Your Audience with Dr. Lorena Stone. Her poetry appears in Poetry Super Highway. Markman has edited textbooks for Houghton Mifflin, West Publishing and Scholastic, Inc. She has lectured on the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.; UCLA’s Johnson Center Foundation; the Rotary Club; Wittenberg University; The Jewish War Veterans; and The Jewish Family Service. At Washington, D.C.’s, Gallaudet University for the deaf and hearing impaired, she introduced its faculty to dialogue journal writing, the topic of her doctoral dissertation and an integral part of her teaching career.