Nancy Massand’s first published piece was in The Sunday Telegram in Worcester, Massachusetts, during the Jurassic era. She was ten. No one had ever heard of a computer, or even an electric typewriter. She wrote a short essay on secrets with a surprising twist, and when she saw her byline she was hooked for life.
Many tattered notebooks later, her first short story, “The Believer,” won eleventh place in the annual Writer’s Digest short story competition.
She landed her first teaching job in New Jersey, where she met her husband in church and got engaged three months later. Now married forty-eight years, she and Mike have three daughters and sons-in-law, and nine grandchildren.
After a bit of moving around to Chicago, Los Angeles and Vancouver during the early years of marriage, they settled in New York City, where she served as as an English teacher and middle school dean at an independent school in Queens. Several of her former students are published authors, which gives her great pleasure. She and her husband now live in Texas, having migrated from the Big Apple to Big Sky. Although officially “retired,” Nancy is active in the arts and as well as coaching young writers who are enjoying the thrill of getting published.
Nancy’s short stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul, A Cup of Comfort, InD’Tale Magazine, Literary Mama and various online sites such as Storyhouse.org. She has collaborated on scripts for two children’s musicals picked up by Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena as well as a one act monologue presented at a recent Navigators’ conference in Dallas. Her debut novel, The Circle Unbroken, was a First Place Winner in the 2018 Romance Writers of America’s annual Hearts Through History competition. It was released by Soul Mate Publishing in September 2019, and a sequel is in the works. Happily, a laptop has replaced her dog-eared notebooks and the cloud is now her manuscript drawer. Still writing after all these years.
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