Robert Balmanno is a retiree from the Sunnyvale Public Library after 32 years of service. He was also a trade union activist for more than 40 years. He earned his bachelor's degree in Political Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and did some post-graduate work at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and the University of London, King's College.

He served in West Africa in the Peace Corps in Dahomey (Benin) from 1973 to 1975. Balmanno worked with cattle in a remote region where no outsiders have been before, and where the New World practices and beliefs of voodoo originated among the Adja people -- the forest people of West Africa.

Robert is the author of four novels, September Snow, Runes of Iona, Embers of the Earth and Augur's Touchstone. A semi-Luddite, that is to say, ambiguously oriented toward -- and at times suspicious of -- technological advances in communication, Balmanno lives in Silicon Valley surrounded by Facebook, Apple, Google, Yahoo, and others.

Photo: Tombstone dedicated to a man named Robert Balmanno, Glasgow cathedral cemetery, in Scotland, circa 1730 to 1750.