Barbara Walsh

Barbara A. Walsh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of August Gale: A Father and Daughter's Journey into the Storm. The biography/memoir is about the 1935 gale that killed several of her Irish/Newfoundland ancestors, and her grandfather, a man who stirred his own tempests. In August Gale, Walsh--who has interviewed killers, bad cops, and crooked politicians in the course of her career--faces the most challenging story of her lifetime: asking her father about his childhood pain. In the process, she takes us on two heartrending odysseys: one into a deadly Newfoundland hurricane and the lives of schooner fishermen who relied on God and the wind to carry them home. The other, into a squall stirred by a man with many secrets, the grandfather who remained a mystery until long after his death. Long before she began writing August Gale, Barbara lived in Galway in 1981 and worked as a photographer for the Galway Advertiser. The only "Yank" on the paper's staff, she struggled to figure out the rules for Gaelic football. She also couldn't fathom how to light a peat fire or make a decent cup of tea. "Ye bloody Eejit!," her Irish friends would scold when she failed miserably at both jobs. Barbara lives in Maine now, where she drinks lots of coffee and uses a gas fire place. She is also the author of Sammy in the Sky, a children's book illustrated by Painter Jamie Wyeth. She Skypes into book clubs around the world and more about her can be found on her web site: barbarawalsh.net, Facebook, or on Wikipedia. She can be reached at: bwalshauthor@gmail.com