NPTR 8

D r. Maria Jacketti is a multi-genre writer and long-time college professor. She has six books, over two hundred articles, and hundreds of poems in print. Her work spans poetry, fiction,  creative nonfiction, journalism, and copywriting. She and her husband Wayne Funk run a three-year-old writing business, Mountain Laurel Consultants. The focus of the business is copywriting, e-writing, and white paper composition for enlightened companies and organizations.

Her long collection of poetry, Medusa’s Hairdresser,  has been accepted for publication by Warnborough College Press, as has her novel, When Kundalini Comes Home. These books should be published before the end of 2013.

Tonight, Maria will be talking about the book she has not yet written.  In 1981, her mother, Pearl Mucci Jacketti  was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer.  She had lost her job and insurance two years before the diagnosis.  As a lower middle class person who was unemployed, she could not afford medical treatment. The lack of early diagnosis–and all the baggage that comes along with being middle class without insurance–led to her early death. Pearl Jacketti’s story has been the story of millions of Americans, for decades…people who lose everything, including their lives,  and whatever portion of the American dream they had managed to accrue–having lived in good faith to a country which betrayed them.