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Arts & Entertainment

Local Author Wins Clarion

Bethany resident Anne Witkavitch wins prestigious award for her anthology featuring women writers.

A Bethany resident is now the proud owner of a prestigious national book award.

Bethany resident Anne Witkavitch has been named the recipient of this year’s National Clarion Award for Books & CD-Rom/DVDs by The Association for Women in Communications for her anthology, Press Pause Moments: Essays about Life Transitions by Women Writers.

The Clarion Awards is a renowned competition sought after by both men and women. The awards annually recognize excellence in communications fields. This year’s pool of competition featured men and women from thirty states and three countries. There were 90 awards awarded altogether.

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Witkavitch’s 244 page anthology of stories chronicles life transitions submitted from thirty-six  female writers ranging in age from 18-70, and was edited by Witkavitch. Witkavitch’s story, “Returning to the Land of Academia”, is featured as the first story and tells of her personal tribulation of returning to complete her Master’s of Fine Arts at Western Connecticut State University.

For Witkavitch, the highly lauded Clarion Award came as a surprise.

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“The fact that I was able to have my voice recognized and the voices of all of these tremendous writers was such a high honor,” Witkavitch said. “A Clarion was beyond my expectations. I’m just thrilled.”

Witkavitch’s book is a product of perseverance and a journey completed in its own right. After obtaining her M.F.A. in January, 2008 Witkavitch left the corporate world with the intention of getting published.

Witkavitch founded Press Pause Now, a retreat designed to give women a place where they could gather to focus on their life goals. As she explains in the introduction, the next step following the retreat was to create a book whose power to instruct women on how to take control of their lives was generated by the stories told.

“Storytelling,” she says in her introduction, “was the key to hitting ‘play’ and moving forward with a strong belief in oneself and one’s purpose.”

The anthology, therefore, was designed to give women a place to be heard.

According to Witkavitch, she started getting responses from people telling her how important the book was.

"The book started coming together and the vision crystallized,” she said.

During the writing of her anthology on transitions, Witkavitch had to live through a transition of her own when her oldest sister Marybeth, a breast cancer survivor in her 40’s, began to deteriorate in health after a seven year battle with melanoma.

Marybeth passed in Novemer, 2009. Her picture is featured on the cover of the book, which was published in Sepetmber, 2010.

Witkavitch would settle for nothing short of perfection in her pursuit of publication, who ultimately decided to print through Kiwi Publishing of Woodbridge.

“Everything about the book had to be the best quality,” Witkavitch said. “This had to represent the best writing. The book itself had to be appealing.”

The decicion to go with Kiwi was the right one.

“I really lucked out (with Kiwi),” she said.

But luck aside, the book was a product of her hard work. Witkatvitch agonized over the final order of essays, whose order was of utmost importance. A lot of planning must go into such a collection, such as topics, pacing and balance while paying attention to consistency, flow and style.

Most impressive is the fact that she was able to complete in fourteen months with her anthology what normally takes anthology writers two to three years to accomplish.

Anne Witkavitch now turns her attention to her business, Anne W Associates, who has been setting up speaking engagements locally and beyond. She will also be attending the Clarion awards ceremony on October 15 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Witkavitch is available to speak at local events. In addition to Press Pause Moments, she will also be featured in another anthology of writers due out in January, the focus on “family.”  She is also polishing up two novels on women in transition.

For more information about Press Pause Moments and the featured writers, visit the website at www.presspausemoments.com. Copies of the book can be purchased on the website as well as amazon.com and kiwipublishing.com. In addition, she can be found on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/AnneWAssociates.

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