Judy McConnell reads from "Just Keep Shooting: My Youth in Manhattan: Memoir of a Midwestern Girl in the 1950s and 1960s"

Judy McConnell’s new book is a sequel to A Penny A Kiss: Memoir of a Minnesota Girl in the forties and Fifties. Just Keep Shooting finds the young girl entering her twenties. Anxious to shake off the past, she strikes out on her own to forge a career in the exciting business mecca that was New York City in the nineteen fifties. Eager, determined, fresh diploma in hand, she arrives to establish a life as an independent woman in a conformist era when young women were expected to marry and reproduce. Caught in the spirit of revolt and change that ignites the sixties, she throws aside convention as she sets out to discover like-minded free spirits and create a life that will satisfy her wanderlust and shape her identity. Her dreams light up the sky, but is she able to follow them through to the Promised Land?

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Judy McConnell was born in Charleston, West Virginia and moved to Minnesota with her family in 1939. She became interested in writing at an early age, but didn't get around to writing a book until age 73. After graduating in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, she traveled and lived on the coasts for a while before marrying and taking up careers as a teacher, training specialist, and documentation writer. Divorced, she lives in active retirement in St. Louis Park and is the proud parent of two and grandparent of five.