UMPI to host reading, signing
with Cathie Pelletier
PRESQUE ISLE — The University of Maine at Presque Isle will present a special evening with award-winning writer Cathie Pelletier on Monday, June 3, at 7 p.m. in the UMPI Library, when it hosts a reading and book signing for her long-anticipated new novel “The One-Way Bridge.”
Cathie Pelletier’s 10th novel, 
published by Sourcebooks, returns readers to the logging town of Mattagash, the scene of several of her novels including “The Funeral Makers” and “The Weight of Winter.” The June 3 reading is part of “The One-Way Bridge” national book tour.
The author is no stranger to The County or the University. Pelletier hails from Allagash and recently returned to her family homestead to focus on her many writing projects. She also served as UMPI’s very first writer-in-residence in 2008. Her novels have been praised as “hilarious, generous and genuine” (New Yorker), “bitingly original” (Vogue), “masterful,” (Washington Post), and “funny and unexpectedly moving” (New York Times). She is “absolutely, inherently funny,” says the Los Angeles Times, “yet she can walk the tightrope between humor and grief without once losing her balance.”
Image courtesy of UMPI
UMPI WILL HOST a reading by author Cathie Pelletier on June 3, featuring her latest book, “The One-Way Bridge.” 
Pelletier began writing “The One-Way Bridge” in 1991 while living in Tennessee. The first draft was finished in Eastman, Quebec, after she moved to Canada in 2005. Twelve drafts and 375 deleted pages later, the final version was completed after she moved back to her family’s homestead in Allagash.
Pelletier is the author of 10 novels, eight of which are under her own name, and two she wrote under the pseudonym K. C. McKinnon. She has also collaborated on musical writing projects with the likes of Tanya Tucker, Skeeter Davis, Doug Kershaw, including a No. 1 hit for Kathy Mattea that was voted Song of the Year.
As if news of a new novel weren’t enough to delight Pelletier fans, Sourcebooks has announced that it is putting all seven of her previous novels back into new paperback print. The publisher plans to re-launch them in the coming months.
Copies of “The One-Way Bridge” will be on display and for sale during the event at UMPI, which is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served and wine will be available (with proper ID) through a cash bar. For more information about Pelletier and her work, visit www.cathiepelletier.com. FMI about her reading at UMPI or to RSVP by Wednesday, May 29, call Gayla Shaw in the Office of Community and Media Relations at 768-9452 or e-mail gshaw@umpi.edu.
