Outskirts Press, INC.

Alumna of Spelman College in Atlanta and Howard University in Washington, D.C., Dr. Linda Quillian has worked in television and radio, in addition to public school and college administration. As an international scholar, she has studied literature, film, and culture of the francophone world at the Goree Institute in Senegal, West Africa under sponsorship of the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Currently, Dr. Quillian is a retired professor and Dean for Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Having served as an educator for a half century, she continues her professional passion in fiction and memoir. Wielding creative writing to impart life lessons that equip the incurable romantic with authentic scenarios, she enables readers to negotiate challenges and missteps that emerge in relationships domestic and amour. As the mother of two and grandmother of three, she was inspired to pen Calluses of the Heart with the determination to lend lessons from personal experiences that would empower her granddaughters to outrun the traps of gender, prioritize with practicality over emotion, and maximize time and happiness by recognizing markers of unhealthy relationships and employing proven maneuvers to avoid and escape them. The vignettes ensure that love does not have to touch a stove’s eye to know it will burn. Dr. Quillian now relishes the freedom of retirement that opens a large window for writing entertaining fiction and memoir. House on the Corner is her previous novel unveiling the archetypal arrogance of a pedophile, abiding in his sense of insidious invincibility, as he employs drug cocktails to satisfy his own deviant dysfunction with unsuspecting women. In her present work, Calluses of the Heart, she continues the medium of cautionary tale as figures from her past assume characters who reenact blunders and rebounds when engaged in the unpredictable parameters of romance.