There's a Reason Flowers Are Not Gray

Nanci Woody was a college Dean and author of accounting and business math textbooks before writing her novel, Tears and Trombones. It won the IPPY (Independent Publishers) award for "Best Fiction in the Western Pacific." Recently she wrote the pilot for a streaming series for the novel.

With her musician husband, she wrote the lyrics and book for a stage musical, "Hello to Life!" that they produced in Sacramento. Her short stories and poems have appeared in, among other places, The CWC Literary Review, The Tule Review, a CWC Anthology, October Hill Magazine, The Persimmon Tree, The Fault Zone, Tule Review, Your Daily Poem, The Nervous Ghost Press, Monterey Poetry Review, and Haight Ashbury Literary Journal.

Nanci is also an artist and photographer. Her photo, "Supermoon," won the Juror's Award at the CA State Fair and Curator's Award at the KVIE/PBS Art Auction. Her drawing, "Smile" was featured in The Persimmon Tree.

Nanci Woody's poems move from the sorrow of loss and the anger of betrayal to the joys of children and grandchildren. They vary in style from free verse to rhyme with several sonnets among the narrative poems. But it's the music of Woody's poems that enchants us; I particularly enjoyed her rhyming poem "If I Could Be Your Instrument." Nanci's poems, like the knots in our hands, tell the truth, even as individual poems provide the reader with a bouquet of blossoms.

- Bob Stanley, Poet Laureate Emeritus of Sacramento, past President of Sacramento Poetry Center

In There's a Reason Flowers Are Not Gray, the ordinary becomes luminous and the private becomes universal. With lyrical precision and emotional clarity, Nanci Woody captures what it means to remember, to forgive, and to keep loving across the decades. This collection is a moving meditation on the ties that shape us and the ways they continue to live within us long after voices are stilled.

- Geri Spieler, past President, Peninsula Branch of California Writers Club, and author of Housewife Assassin - The Woman Who Tried to Kill President Ford