Dr. Nancy Allen-Mastro will be speaking on Saturday, Aug. 16, about her recently published debut novel, “Solitary Walker: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft”.

Allen-Mastro is a former curriculum director for Prior Lake-Savage Area Schools. When she retired from education in 2017, she took up writing fiction as a hobby. Writing under the pen name N.J. Mastro, Allen-Mastro didn’t become a writer when she graduated from high school. Instead, she became an educator and spent nearly four decades in public schools, starting out as a kindergarten teacher in Northern Minnesota and finishing her career as superintendent at West St. Paul-Mendota Heights-Eagan Area Schools in the Twin Cities.

During that time, however, she kept writing on the side, playing with language and promising herself that one day she’d write that book.

“It wasn’t until I retired that I had time to devote to the task. Writing an entire novel is an arduous undertaking, and I write historical fiction, which requires a tremendous amount of research,” she said. Allen-Mastro said she wanted to write the kind of novel she likes to read—historical biographical novels featuring real women from the past.

Her dream came true this past February when Black Rose Writing published her novel based on the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, the eighteenth-century British writer and philosopher historians widely consider the world’s first feminist. Famous in 1792 for advocating that girls receive the same education as boys and other advancements for women, Wollstonecraft also lived a storied and sometimes tumultuous personal life, which is the focus of the novel.

The author’s presentation at the Prior Lake Library is scheduled from 2 to 4 p.m. She will speak about the novel and her writing process. The event is sponsored by the Laker Educational Foundation of Prior Lake-Savage Area Schools and is free and open to the public. She encourages anyone with an interest in historical fiction to attend, along with people interested in writing their own book.

Allen-Mastro has a bachelor’s degree from Montana State University (Bozeman), a master’s from Bemidji State University, and a doctorate from the University of North Dakota (Grand Forks). She currently resides in South Carolina with her husband, where she is working on her second novel, which takes place in Boston and centers around the release of the novel Jane Eyre in 1847.