As Oprah Winfrey announced the centennial selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club on CBS Mornings Tuesday, Tawni O’Dell, the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of six novels, took to social media to publicly thank Winfrey for selecting her novel Back Roads as an official Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection (#32) back in March of 2001 – describing how the selection changed her life for the better. O’Dell also fondly details the call she received from Winfrey, which quickly turned playful as O’Dell believed she was being pranked. You can check out the heartfelt thank you video here.

“Being part of Oprah’s Book Club was life changing for me not only because she sent my first novel,Back Roads, skyrocketing to the top of the bestseller list, but because she surprised me on her show by reuniting me with my ninth grade English teacher who was the first person to tell me I should be a writer. I will never forget the thoughtfulness behind that moment. Thank you, Oprah, for also affirming for me that I should be a writer and for encouraging the world to be readers!”
 
InBack Roads,Harley Altmyer should be in college drinking beer and chasing girls. He should be freed from his stifling coal town with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he’s marooned in the Pennsylvania backwoods caring for his three younger sisters after the shooting death of his physically abusive father and the arrest of his mother. Life is further complicated when he develops an obsession with the sexy, melancholic mother of two down the road. When she stuns him by responding to his advances, family secrets and unspoken truths threaten to consume him. In the face of each staggering revelation, Harley does the best he can to hold it all together. Violent and disturbing yet touching and darkly funny, Harley’s story is ultimately a search for his own self-worth as he slowly comes to realize that survival is a talent.
 
Back Roads was released as a film in 2018 and featured at the Tribeca Film Festival with a screenplay adapted by Ms. O’Dell. Her first play, When It Happens to You, received rave reviews during its off-Broadway run in 2019. Her play Pay The Writer is scheduled to begin rehearsals at the prestigious Riverside Studios in Hammersmith London. Rehearsals begin Aug 1^st with an opening night of August 28^th. She wrote the audio drama Closing the Distance, an enormously popular podcast of pandemic-themed monologues performed in real-time by legendary stars including Kathleen Turner, Jason Alexander, Tony Danza, and Kelli O’Hara. The production is set to open on June 19^th in New York as a stage iteration entitled Windows. Tawni is the mother of two – her son is a recent PhD grad from Berkley, and her daughter is an established chef in New York. Ms. O’Dell is a native of Pennsylvania, and a graduate of Northwestern University.