I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, listening to my mother's stories of life in early 20th century Idaho. Several of them were about the boys from "New Joisey" occupying a side camp up the creek from her uncle's ranch. Desperate boys from back East, they were members of the Civilian Conservation Corps doing reclamation projects in the rugged area of the Salmon River. From these stories came TREE SOLDIER, set in 1930s in the North Cascades Mountains of Washington State. The novel is the 2012 EPIC ebook Award winner for historical fiction and 2013 Chanticleer Book Reviews Grand Prize winner.  Recently, it was a quarter finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest.