About
Born in Richmond, Virginia, and carted back and forth between Virginia and Baltimore, I blame my rootless, restless personality on my father. He was and is a traveling salesman with a keen gift of gab, great wit, a ready joke, and could sell white tennis shoes to coal miners.
It was during these sojourns up and down the east coast I soaked up the stories that would later be Tobacco Sticks and Mica Highways. I think authors should exploit their family history before raping the rest of the culture for material.
Dad finally got tired of the east and moved to the Midwest when I was fourteen. We settled outside of Chicago. It is here I came of age and went off to college for seven years -- two degrees and one novel later I returned to Chicago and lived in many different apartments, trying to get a little two hundred page manuscript called Ripples published.
When a local printer said he would take a chance on my book, I jumped and had my first novel published by a man who had never published anything. Great reviews and moderate sales put me back to my jobs as a janitor, baker, waiter, construction worker, teacher, real estate tycoon, mortgage broker, professor, security guard, salesman -- anything to make a buck and keep writing. The printer lost his mind and published my second novel, too. That landed me with Bantam after some rave reviews and a paperback auction for my second novel, Tobacco Sticks.
A third novel, Mica Highways, was sold on less than one hundred and fifty pages to Bantam and then I did a strange thing -- I settled down to writing in Ernest Hemingway's birthplace in Oak Park, Illinois. I have since been looking for the Great American Novel up in the old red oak rafters and I think I might have finally found one... we'll see.
A Dime Is a Sign: Poems of Love and Loss (Feelings Into Words)
Description
<p>A psychic medium once said that if you find a random dime, it is a sign that someone that you have loved and lost is thinking of you.</p><p><strong>A Dime is a Sign Through Time</strong></p><p><em>If you find a dime, </em></p><p><em>You will know that I'm</em></p><p><em>Sending thoughts of love</em></p><p><em>Through the veil of time.</em></p><p> </p><p><em>Ten cents with a silver shine, </em></p><p><em>A sense sent you to help remind</em></p><p><em>That someone who left you behind</em></p><p><em>Is always living in your mind.</em></p><p> </p><p><em>Sending love and vibes, </em></p><p><em>Felt as psychic sighs ...</em></p><p><em>The ones that you miss, </em></p><p><em>Send you a kiss ...</em></p><p> </p><p>Sherrill S. Cannon's second book of poetry contains messages written through the years in poetic form that put feelings into words. As a teacher, many of her poems helped counsel troubled teens and friends.</p><p>There are three sections in the book: Heads, Spinning, and Tails ... (Love & Loss: Coin Toss?). The variety of lyrical poetry forms include free verse, blank verse, haiku, and sonnets, while some are just playing with words!</p><p>Hopefully, this is also a book of healing.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Sherrill S. Cannon, a former teacher and grandmother of ten, is the author of nine acclaimed rhymed children's books, plus a recent award-winning book of poetry <em>(A Penny for Your Thoughts), </em>which together have received 63 national and international book awards since 2011. She also wrote seven published plays for elementary school children that have been performed in over 25 countries. Most of her children's books emphasize consideration for others. Married for 58 years, she and her spouse are now retired, live in Pennsylvania, and travel in their RV from coast to coast, spending time with their children and grandchildren, and sharing her books along the way!</p><p> </p>
Story Behind The Book
Rocket Man was written after I moved to the suburbs from the city. I looked around and found myself and others unable to keep up with what had become the American Dream...the big car, house, bascially the overheated middle class life that had become the American nightmare. When I became the Rocket Man for my son's Scout Troop I knew I had a motif to write this novel of a man isolated in a world rapidly spinning out of control. Rocket Man is a story of our time. A man about to lose his home, trying desperately to hang to what really matters in life. In this way, Rocket Man, is really about us.
Reviews
Best Books of the Year...San Antonoio Express<br />Funniest Novel since Richard Russo's Straight Man...Chicago Sun Times<br />THE FUNNIEST NOVEL OF THE ELECTION YEAR. William Elliott Hazelgrove’s Rocket Man is in the tradition of Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool, Richard Ford’s Independence Day and Tom Poratta‘s Election; all three writers coming to grips with contemporary life in the suburbs. Rocket Man is a satire of life today...Chicago Tribune
