AUTHOR STATEMENT:"I am a Radical Romantic intent on championing and merging beauty and reason. I write both fiction and nonfiction to enrich, enlighten,and inspire. I am determined to confront the cynical concepts of the sensationalist, nihilistic, popular anti-culture in which we now live and encourage a path of self-created distinctiveness, integrity, and pursuit of excellence. My novels fall under the broad category of Romantic-Suspense, but they are based in serious ideas with no escapism, fantasy, or wishful dreaming to waste the brain. My fiction goals are an integral part of my larger mission to contribute directly and indirectly to individual and cultural enrichment through the power of art by dramatizing high ideals that can be actualized in real life. Whether celebrating love and joy or empathizing with loss and pain, my themes intend to be both romantically suspenseful and contemplatively motivational. I want to inspire readers to find personal pleasure and meaning in my work by introducing them to fascinating but believable characters, by visiting exotic locales, and by offering moral and value selections that may enhance their own lives. My nonfiction focuses on the arts and the culture at large, mining history to bring golden nuggets of universal truths to fresh, modern light in order to help meet and greet today's contemporary challenges." Here's a book signing interview: https://youtu.be/SZsiH_etUykFORMAL BIO:internationally published author Alexandra York presently draws from her multi-faceted background to focus on fiction and writing and lecturing on the arts and the culture. Her debut novel CROSSPOINTS A Novel of Choice received praise from The Wall Street Journal, V Magazine for Women, and Laissez Faire Book Club among many others; it has been translated into world-wide Russian and Spanish. Her second novel, THE INNOCENT, was released in paperback and on Kindle in 2015. She has a regular Art and Culture column on NewsMax.com, and her monograph LYING AS A WAY OF LIFE: Corruption and Collectivism Come of Age in America has just been launched as of May 1, 2016. She is founding president of American Renaissance for the Twenty-first Century (ART), a NYC-based 501 (C) (3) nonprofit educational foundation devoted to a rebirth of beauty and life-affirming values in all of the fine arts; www.ART-21.orgIn addition to authoring six nonfiction books, Alexandra has also been published in magazine and newspaper articles, book and movie reviews, and poetry. In other media, she both wrote and performed a bi-weekly feature on WPIX-TV Channel 11 Evening News in New York and wrote and hosted two different talk shows that tracked the contemporary performing arts for ABC Radio Network. As an author, she has been a guest on many major talk shows, including "Today," "Larry King Live," "To Tell the Truth," "AM New York," "AM Los Angeles," "AM Philadelphia," "Wake-Up Houston," ABC's "Eyewitness News," and hundreds of local and syndicated radio shows. As a performer, she appeared (along with stage and film work) as principal actress in dozens of TV and radio commercials in America and Europe, culminating that aspect of her career in a year-long tour of the U.S. as an exclusive TV spokeswoman for Clairol,Inc. In person, she has lectured extensively at Town Hall Celebrity Series, private organizations, corporations, universities, and exclusive cruise ships. Alexandra is published in England, Australia, Mexico, South America, Russia, and Spain, as well as the United States and Canada. Aside from her nonfiction books (Book-of-the-Month Club, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, Van Nostrand, Ballantine and Berkley-Jove), her work has also appeared in publications as varied as Reader's Digest (Domestic and International), Vital Speeches, The New York Times, USA Today, Vogue, New Woman, Chronicles, The Humanist, The Intellectual Activist, Reason, American Arts Quarterly, American Artist, and Confrontation Literary Journal. She was for six years the Editor for ART Ideas, a quarterly arts and culture magazine published by her nonprofit foundation American Renaissance for the Twenty-first Century (ART). She was also a national award-winning Editor for Best Roll-Royce magazine, The Atlantic Lady. Alexandra received the 1997 Whiting Memorial Award for "outstanding and continued contribution to the advancement of society" from the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry. She is listed in Who's Who of American Women and Who's Who in America and divides her time between bustling New York City, historic Bucks County, PA, and the contemplative mountains of Vermont.