Pomegranate Seed
Elizabeth Sydney, Oscar-winning grande dame of Hollywood, known to friends as Liza Jane, is 80. She “isn’t ready to go. She doubts she ever will be, but she feels the tug as if someone is trying to hand her a rail ticket and the crowd is pushing her down the platform. So she’s making her will again, because this time she knows what she wants to say.”
An assortment of family and friends assemble for the funeral, leading to the spontaneous combustion that only the forced gathering of movie actors, directors, old and new flames, a rock star, and post-divorce combatants can produce.
Libby Novak, Liza Jane’s niece, returns to the turbulent and ephemeral world that encompassed her youth. Alex Murray, a Pittsburgh cop, has his life upended when he is named one of Liza Jane’s heirs. Producer Ben Zenovich and screenwriter Mike Rosen arrive, dragging a reluctant Frank Hill (box office gold, in the middle of a nasty divorce, and one of Liza Jane’s former lovers) behind them. Liza Jane herself is revealed through reminiscences and a series of flashbacks from the days of silent film through the blacklisting of the McCarthy era, and beyond.
Amanda Cockrell
Amanda Cockrell is a native of California, the daughter of a screenwriter and a novelist. She holds a master’s degree in English and creative writing from Hollins College and is currently the managing editor of Hollins University’s literary journal, The Hollins Critic, and director of the University’s graduate program in children’s literature. She also teaches children’s literature and creative writing in the university’s Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program and Creative Writing MFA program. She has received fellowships in fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Before her teaching career, Cockrell was a newspaper reporter and a copywriter for both an ad agency and a rock radio station.
Her newest book is a young adult novel What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay. Besides Pomegranate Seed, Cockrell is also the author of The Deer Dancers and The Horse Catchers trilogies, mythological novels of the American Southwest; The Legions of the Mist, a novel of Roman Britain; and The Moonshine Blade, a comic thriller set in her current home, southwestern Virginia. Under the pseudonym Dana Fuller Ross, she is the author of The Holts series, and as Damion Hunter, she wrote The Centurions series.
She lives with her husband Tony Neuron in Roanoke, Virginia.
