The Night Field

＂Pyn-Poi’s mother Marak wants her to grow up to be the matriarch of the tribe, learning how to cook, to make medicines, how to care for everyone, but Pyn-Poi would rather be out among the trees like her father Sook-Sook, learning how to persuade tree roots into bridges, to feel when shoots are too crowded, when drooping leaves need attention. Then something starts going wrong in The Real: when the rains come, instead of nourishment, they bring a stinking brown fog that’s poisoning people and plants alike. Pyn-Poi is the treewoman now: it’s her job. Their only chance is for her to climb to the land beyond the Wall, where the Ancestors live, to plead for their intercession. Pyn-Poi never expected to find a whole new world up there, with people who are very different from her own family and friends - a land where they are killing nature, and that’s killing The Real＂--

Pushcart Prize-nominee Donna Glee Williams was born in Mexico, the daughter a Kentucky farm-girl and a Texas large-animal vet. She graduated from Tulane University, then earned an MFA and Ph.D. from Louisiana State University. Her years of wayfaring across twenty countries and four continents include a Fulbright Fellowship to study pesticide issues among small cotton farmers in India, which is where she found the inspiration for The Night Field. She’s worked as turnabout crew on a schooner, librarian, environmental activist, registered nurse, educator, editor and creative coach, as well as writing two fantasy novels, The Braided Path and Dreamers, as well as poetry and non-fiction. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Eastern America.