Jean Boggio
Jean Boggio is a graduate of Allegheny College in Western Pennsylvania with a BA in Drama. She also holds advanced degrees in Education from City College in New York, and Rutgers University in New Jersey. She grew up in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and lived much of her adult life in Hunterdon County, New Jersey where she raised her two children. Jean has been an actress, an elementary school teacher, an entrepreneur, a professional quilter, a certified market gardener, a psychiatric nurse, and is now an author and publisher. She has several future books planned and will publish them through Colerith Press. She now lives in Maine with her six cats in a house that the renovated. |
Stolen Fields: A Story of Eminent Domain and the Death of the American Dream
Synopsis: Boggio weaves the story of growing up as a descendant of the strong-willed and colorful Cole family, whose historic loss of their prosperous farm on Neville Island in Pittsburgh at the time of WWI, through eminent domain, has shadowed the lives of her mother's generation as well as her own. The island was "the market basket of Pittsburgh," and the farms there grew the best asparagus on the East Coast. The loss of the Cole farm grew other things as well: hatred, bitterness, greed, ambition and lust. Boggio tells the story of the past, but swells on the journey toward, and triumph of, the future. Exerpt: (The loss of the farm) did affect us. It was always there, lurking in the background of family stories. There is not one of us in this family today who is ignorant of the events of 1918 to 1921, who does not know that we collectively fell from a certain height and were left to pick ourselves up as best we could. Neville Island is who we were -- who we are...As water ripples out from a pebble thrown into it, so is my generation shaped in the next ring. Whatever our present names, we are the Coles of Neville Island.
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