Graffiti Grandma

Author Jo Barney has spent years working with teenagers and children as a counselor. Her neighborhood includes a park frequented by transients and runaways, as well as a social services agency that serves them. A few years ago she began walking the streets surrounding her apartment, graffiti remover and rags in a bag, wiping away the tags left on the mailboxes and storage units on the corners by midnight artists. She believes, then as now, that adolescents with spray cans tag to make their marks on/in the world. With a MA in counseling, she finds researching drugs and the lives of children on the streets to be both instructional and frightening. Barney has written four novels, several of which have been published as e-books, and she is currently working on a fifth book; again the protagonist is an elderly woman. As a writer and an older woman, Barney plumbs the value and wisdom of ＂old ladies＂ in her stories.