Patricia Vaccarino

Patricia Vaccarino (born October 17, 1956) is an American writer. She has published three novels, and three nonfiction books based on her expertise in public relations.
==Personal life==
Patricia Vaccarino grew up in Yonkers, New York. At fourteen she began writing a novel about Yonkers that eventually became her first literary work, YONKERS Yonkers! Her first Yonkers book is about growing up in Yonkers during the 1960s and 1970s. A sequel, The Heart of Yonkers, was published April 2, 2020. The Yonkers Carnegie Library is featured in both fictional works.
Ms. Vaccarino is currently working on a nonfiction work, The Death of a Library: An American Tragedy, about the circumstances that led to the demolition of the Yonkers Carnegie Library in 1982. The destruction of the Yonkers Carnegie library is a dark hour in Yonkers city history, and has been cited by Yonkers Historical Society board member and local historian Joan Jennings as one of the most shameful moments in the city’s history.
Vaccarino has stated that she feels grateful for having grown up in this hardscrabble working-class town because from an early age it gave her the ability to understand people from all walks of life. The first book in the Yonkers trilogy, YONKERS Yonkers!: A Story of Race and Redemption, explores the racial past of Yonkers, the Vietnam War, the Woodstock Music Festival, and drug use endemic to Yonkers youth in 1970. Although Vaccarino frequently writes about her childhood home of Yonkers, she now divides her time between Seattle, Washington and the North Coast of Oregon.
==Education and career==
Ms. Vaccarino graduated from the University of Rhode Island, and also has advanced education from the University of Puget Sound School of Law (now Seattle University School of Law).
Patricia Vaccarino owned Xanthus Communications and founded the internet company PR for People®. She retired from public relations in 2017.
Ms. Vaccarino has written film scripts, press materials, articles, essays, speeches, web content, marketing collateral, and books that led to her being interviewed on a wide range of topics related to Public Relations. She has counseled people about what they post on social media can have a long-lasting impact on their lives and careers.
Branding is an area of focus in her nonfiction book PR for People. She has been asked to comment on a wide range of branding topics from how the James Bond franchise continues to endure, to essential branding guidelines for people who are not celebrities, including posting epitaphs on social media.
Her workday discipline has generated news due to her commitment to fitness and ballet training. Her book Steps: My not-so-secret life as an adult dancer and how it impacts my life and business was inspired by learning the rigors of ballet at an age when most professional ballerinas have long retired.
She has written essays to demystify the process of how the news gets made, which ultimately led to the publication of her book American Spin. This nonfiction work examines the history of spin from Julius Caesar, the young Caesar Augustus and Queen Elizabeth I of England to present day media stars like Kim Kardashian, Lee Radziwill, and the public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Her writing has not been without controversy. Her essay When the Bronx Looks Like Paris drew criticism from Bronx community activists, including Bronx public officials, who claimed she was depicting a negative portrayal of the Bronx. 
==Literary influences==
As a writer of essays and articles five literary nonfiction works and their authors have influenced Vaccarino’s work: the ground-breaking open letter “J'Accuse...!" written by the French writer Émile Zola and published in 1898 in the newspaper L'Aurore. Other influential works include “Man’s Search for Meaning,” by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl; Ralph Waldo Emerson’s masterpiece, “Self-Reliance,” Eric Hoffer’s seminal work “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements,” and Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor.”
Other authors that have had profound influence on her work include Doris Lessing, Joyce Carol Oates, Iris Murdoch, Patti Smith, and, especially, the Irish writer Edna O’Brien whose coming-of-age trilogy The Country Girls consists of three novels: The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964).
==Bibliography==
===Novels===
* One Small Murder (2010)
* YONKERS Yonkers!: A story of race and redemption (2018)
* The Heart of Yonkers (April, 2020)
* So Not Yonkers (forthcoming)
===Non-fiction===
* PR for People (2009)
* Steps: My not-so-secret life as an adult dancer and how it impacts my life and business (2012)
* American Spin (2015)
* The Death of a Library: An American Tragedy (2020)
==References==
==External links==
* Vaccarino - Amazon.com
* Patricia Vaccarino on twiitter
* Patricia Vaccarino | PR for People
* Patricia Vaccarino Books | List of books by author Patricia
* YONKERSYonkers by Patricia Vaccarino - Goodreads
* About Patricia Vaccarino - BookBuzzr
Category:1956 births
Category:Living people
Category:American people
Category:American writers
Category:American non-fiction writers
Category:American authors
Category:University of Rhode Island alumni
Category:Seattle University School of Law alumni