Into That Good Night is a son's gift. Seemingly powerless to do anything but witness the slow loss of his father's past, Ron Rozelle re-creates and reclaims his own past: the dusty streets, tired old houses, and wallpapered rooms of his childhood. Rozelle tells of his early, confused discovery of racial inequality, his induction into the military, his decision to become a teacher himself, and the deaths of his parents. Poignant and impressionistic, Into That Good Night is a heartbreakingly lyrical memoir whose fine cadences and shining images will echo for a long time to come.

I’m the author of Into That Good Night, a memoir, The Windows of Heaven, a novel of the 1900 Galveston storm, A Place Apart, a novel set in modern day Ohio, Warden: Death and Life in the Texas Prison System (coauthored with Jim Willett) and Description & Setting: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting a Believable World of People, Places, and Events, a volume in the Writer’s Digest Write Great Fiction series.  

My memoir, Into That Good Night, was the first non-agented property published by New York’s venerable Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in over five years, was a national short list finalist for the P.E.N. Prize and the Texas Institute of Letters Carr P. Collins Award and was selected as the second best work of nonfiction in the nation for the year 1998 by the San Antonio Express-News. I’ve taught writing workshops at numerous conferences and universities, and was twice the memoir teacher at the Newman National Writer’s Conference at Mississippi College.   

Touching Winter, my novel made up of a quartet of stories, was published in October, 2005, by TCU Press and was a short list finalist for The Texas Institute of Letters Best Fiction of the Year Prize.  My Boys and Girls are in There: The 1937 New London School Disaster (Texas A&M University Press) was the recipient of the Calvert Prize, was pronounced the “sleeper hit” of the 2012 Texas Book Festival, and was a short list finalist for the Best Nonfiction Award given by the Writers’ League of Texas. 

Sundays with Ron Rozelle (I hate that title; it sounds like a devotional), a collection of some of my newspaper columns, was published by TCU Press. My most recent  book is Exiled: The Last Days of Sam Houston, published by Texas A&M University Press. My next book, a novel titled Leaving the Country of Sin, will be published in mid March.  

I was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2007 and am a proud graduate of Sam Houston State University, class of 1977.  

My wife Karen, a retired third grade teacher, and I are spoiling grandparents and recently retired empty nesters with the exception of an elderly opinionated cat.  

Source: ronrozellewordsmith.wordpress.com