Congratulations!

Eben Reilly (picured here with her three children)  lives in a nether world of fiction and drama playing out in her head as she shuttles between her home in Castleton, Vermont and her livelihood in New York City where she teaches for ASA Institute and CUNY. Having earned an MFA in Playwriting at Brooklyn College in the late 1980’s, she detoured into marriage and technical writing, primarily grants, proposals and press releases for public sculptor and husband Robert Ressler. When Reilly moved to Vermont with her husband to raise their three children, then two, three and five, she began freelancing children’s stories and poems, segueing into Young Adult fiction as her children reached their own adolescence. However, life has a way of circling back, and with Return to West Raven the author has returned to drama, recently completing her second play entitled: Bodies Whose Bodies.

Eben Reilly gratefully acknowledges her publisher, Trevor Lockwood of Braiswick, not only for publishing her YA novels, Daughter Dedannan and Wolf, but for his almost daily encouragement to keep writing. She also thanks Ben Ressler for his imaginative contribution to those novels, Teddy and Moriah for critiquing all her work, and Robert Ressler for showing her that in the Arts tenacity pays.

"Return to West Raven" takes place in a southern Vermont town where Adam Pierce, up from NYC for the summer, encounters his Gulf War dad's ghost among the wrecked cars and vans that litter his uncle’s back acres. Sapped by the lethargy and sickness of Gulf War Syndrome, and driven to despair by the government's refusal to acknowledge his disease, Richard Pierce had driven his VW Rabbit under the wheels of an oncoming tractor trailer truck when his son was only five-- a fatal accident that only now Adam understands was no accident, only now can the two face head on in an attempt to restore their wrecked lives.