Nancy was born in Washington, D.C., on July 14, 1942, where she lived until entering the third grade. The Fourth Quarter memoir explains how and why she migrated to East Tennessee, where she completed college and has now lived most of her adult life.
Between her junior and senior years of college, Nancy took a break. She found a clerical job in D.C. 1963 was unexpectedly eventful as she became involved in the Civil Rights movement. As a new CORE member, she took part in protest marches and attended the March on Washington to hear MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Returning to college in Tennesse, Nancy married the man she met as her biology lab instructor. They raised a daughter and were married for 48 years before he passed away in 2012.
Various forks in the road redirected Nancy’s initial ambition of becoming a teacher. She spent fifteen years as a social worker, first with the State Department of Human Services, during which she completed a year of graduate school in Social Work at UT, then with a Community Action Agency. She spent the next twenty-five years of her working life as a human resources manager, followed by consulting.
In 2016, Nancy moved to Knoxville to be closer to her daughter in her dotage.
Online dating had been a very uncomfortable experience, and when she had just reached the “I give up stage,” she met Ron Pressley.
Nancy and Ron began their writing journey with memoirs for their children. They found revisiting the past was such a cathartic and enjoyable process that they took a leap into historical fiction with their co-written series, Blood Brothers.
Since that venture into self-publishing, Nancy has added a fictionalized version of their love story, Spring Flowers in the Snow, and a collection of short stories and essays in Swamp-Billy Chronicles.
