Curtis Seltzer

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I blog at https://curtisseltzer.wordpress.com.

"The Point of the Pick: A Novel of the 20th Century" is available in paperback and ebook. It's the story of a 1975 battle for the presidency of the coal miner's union that blows up when the Mob corrupts both candidates. The Mafia wants to "Teamsterize" the union and gain access to its welfare fund and Washington bank. Three stand in the way--an idealistic lawyer who's managing the insurgent candidate, an ambitious feminist reporter and a former professional wrestler, The Coalfield Avenger.

"The Point" has been compared to Mario Puzo's "The Godfather" and praised by crime writer Dan Moldea. Comparable books include Ross Thomas’s “The Porkchoppers”; Andrew Gross’s “Button Man”; Zola’s “Germinal”; Sinclair’s “King Coal”; the first sections of Ken Follett’s “Fall of Giants” and “Place Called Freedom”; John Grisham’s “Gray Mountain”; Denise Giardina’s “Storming Heaven”; John Knowles’ “A Vein of Riches”; Davis Grubb’s “The Barefoot Man”; Harriet Arnow’s “The Dollmaker”; Brit Hume’s, “Death and the Mines” (non-fiction); Paul Cronin’s “A Time to Stir: Columbia ’68” (non-fiction); Paul Auster’s “4 3 2 1” (Columbia section) and Clara Bingham’s “Witness to the Revolution” (non-fiction).

"The Point" is available to the book trade through CreateSpace Direct. That means you can order it at any bookstore in the USA and get it delivered in a week! Libraries can get it through Baker & Taylor.

I want to thank the agents and editors who have asked about the rights to my books. I own all the rights, and I welcome inquiries about screenplay adaptations, foreign language editions, movie rights and representation. Please email me at curtisseltzer@htcnet.org if you would like more information. I

BIOGRAPHY

Curtis Seltzer has lived and worked in the country for the better part of 40 years. He graduated from Pittsburgh’s Peabody High School in 1963 where his classmates voted him second funniest, which he continues to think he is.

He has a BA from Oberlin College, and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. He was briefly enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the school of education of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, but left after intentionally flunking a course called, “Survival Techniques in the Educational Bureaucracy.” He did not survive the real educational bureaucracy; neither did his professor.

Curtis wrote How To Be a DIRT-SMART Buyer of Country Property (2007) to help buyers understand how to research, evaluate and purchase rural real estate. At 750 pages, it is a comprehensive how-to guide.

He bought his first country place in the early 1970s, 60 acres of recently timbered woods north of Amherst. Subsequently, he’s owned property in about a dozen states and has scoped property in 20 others for buyers.

He has helped clients find and buy timberland, farms, second homes, development land and conservation property worth more than $10 million. He facilitated the purchase of 5,000 acres in eastern North Carolina that is red wolf habitat and 3,100 acres in the Adirondack Park that was owned by Mutt Lange and Shania Twain.

Since the mid-1990s, he’s worked with properties ranging from 600,000 acres in Canada to 3,000 acres in Hawaii, from 30 acres in West Tennessee to 55,000 acres in Georgia.

Curtis wrote "Fire in the Hole: Miners and Managers in the American Coal Industry" that Ken Ward, Jr., 2018 MacArthur Fellow, praised as "a huge help over the years to me.” He self-syndicated more than 400 columns and won awards from the Virginia Press Association. He has written for the Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Monthly, Nation and the Financial Times.

Since 1983, he and his family have lived on a cattle-and-timber farm in Blue Grass, Virginia. He has produced more than 550,000 pounds of grass-fed beef and more than one million board feet of hardwood sawtimber and veneer.

His wife, Melissa Ann Dowd, is one of two lawyers in Highland County. She is the part-time elected Commonwealth Attorney, part-time counsel to the Highland County Board of Supervisors and has a part-time private practice, focusing on real estate, business and estates.

Their daughter, Molly, graduated from the University of Virginia in 2007 and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 2008. After working for Bloomberg News and JPMorgan Chase in New York City. she landed at Google in San Francisco as a speechwriter and internal-communications manager.