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Air Force Flyer Reveals The Difficult Challenges Facing Women in The Military

Air Force flyer reveals the difficult challenges facing women in the military

In real life, Air Force flight crew member Kim Ponders is just like the characters in her books: tough, independent and she knows how to hold her own inside the elite male dominated fraternity of flyers in the US military. In her new novel, The Last Blue Mile, she shares the more personal challenges that women face in the military every day.

The Last Blue Mile describes the life of a young female Air Force Academy cadet named Brook Searcy, a young ambitious woman who thought she could handle it all. A freshman at the Air Force Academy, she's trying to survive Hell Week and stake her identity inside a place reluctant to shed its evangelical, male-dominated traditions. When a cheating scandal erupts, General John Waller must catch the culprit, and Brook finds herself closer to the heat than she realized. Both Searcy and Waller fight through the sometimes hilarious, sometimes sadistic tyrannies of academy life. But when a tragic accident divides the academy, they must decide whether the not-so-perfect world of the military is worth the sacrifice it demands.

The Last Blue Mile
By Kim Ponders
ISBN: 0060847069
HarperCollins Pages: 320
Ages: 18 and Up

Kim Ponders presents an extraordinary story of a woman's perseverance in the rough and unsentimental world of military flight. She uncovers the proud and sometimes backstabbing world of the Air Force Academy in an exciting novel about why people commit to military life-and where they draw the line.

Here is a thrilling and sobering and compelling work that provides deft insight into the mostly male fraternity of the Air Force and illuminates a world we hardly ever see, much less understand.

The Art of Uncontrolled Flight
By Kim Ponders
Hardcover
Harper Collins
ISBN 0060786086

This smart, tightly-drawn novel traces the life of Annie Shaw, a tough Air Force pilot at the brink of the Gulf War. The spare prose hardly prepares the reader for the emotional complexity of a little girl who loses her mother and, out of love and spite, follows her father into a hell-raising life in the Air Force. Annie is a young captain, wife, and co-pilot, facing up to the first real American war in half a century. She wants to prove herself, but she finds that as the war unfolds, the glory and honor she wanted is far more complicated-and elusive-than she'd ever imagined.

Both books are available at bookstores nationwide and online.

For more information visit http://www.kimponders.com/

Who is Kim Ponders?

Kim Ponders grew up near Boston, Massachusetts and graduated from Syracuse University. She worked as a small-town reporter in northern California. In 1989, she attended Officer Training School and was commissioned into the Air Force as a second lieutenant.

In 1991, she became qualified as an air weapons controller on the E-3 AWACS and went to Saudi Arabia with Desert Storm, becoming one of the first American women to fly in combat. She spent the next five years flying missions out of Saudi Arabia and Turkey, providing air supplies to the Kurds in northern Iraq and monitoring the Iraqi no-fly zone. These experiences formed the basis of her first novel, The Art of Uncontrolled Flight.

Now a major, Kim works as a speechwriter for a three-star general at the Pentagon.

She holds an M.S. in international relations and an M.F.A. from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She writes about the military and political affairs for Blogher.org. Her first novel, The Art Of Uncontrolled Flight, was released with HarperCollins in 2005 to critical praise. Her second novel, The Last Blue Mile, will be released in May 2007.

She lives in southern New Hampshire with her husband and two boys.

judythpiazza@gmail.com