Dedicated to best publishing practices
NancyKay Wessman has been working with words for more than 50 years—as a journalist, public relations practitioner, health communicator, and now in publishing as author, editor, coach, and consultant. She is the author of Katrina, Mississippi: Voices From Ground Zero and co-author of You Can Fix The Fat From Childhood & Other Heart Disease Risks, Too.
Through Wessman’s editorial services, other writers have published seven books, including five nonfiction and two fiction titles. Two other books await publication, and a tenth, a memoir, is in development.
Wessman cut her teeth in editing, starting as a proofreader at her hometown weekly newspaper, The Magee Courier, where she both reported and edited the news. As writer/editor at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, she learned how to “write tight, write it right” from a boss lady who had mastered her craft at The Chicago Tribune.
Nine years after graduating from the University of Southern Mississippi, she began what would become a 25-year career at Mississippi State Department of Health. She developed public information into a comprehensive communications and public relations service within the Mississippi State Department of Health and also earned a master’s of public health degree at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.
Through those jobs and related organizational activities, Wessman has taught and coached emerging writers, journalists, and PR practitioners. After state service, she launched WessComm, LLC, to provide communications and management consulting and services. For Tulane University SPHTM, she developed and taught web-based courses on health risk communication and media relations.
On the Board of Directors of the Mississippi Writers Guild, she previously served as president of the National Public Health Information Coalition and Public Relations Association of Mississippi. She has been a speaker or panelist at numerous state and national events and a consultant to many national public health organizations. She is a member of The Author’s Guild and of Editorial Freelancers Association.
And In Her Own Words
From my work in the Fourth Estate (newspaper and journalism) through what I claim to have been a stellar career in public health communications, I am nowhere near ready to quit. In fact, I relish what I consider my “new” career: editor extraordinaire!
A writer, published author, speaker, spokesperson, teacher—I continue to enjoy working with message and audience to assure clear, concise, consistent communication. As a writing coach and editor, I listen. I hear other writers’ dreams and desires to publish and sell books, and then I help them advance through the several stages of development to offer their words on paper and in electronic form.
I value truth and honesty, and I am dedicated to best business practices, sensitive to and respectful of people as individuals, and committed to helping others achieve their communication and publishing goals.
NancyKay is a published author
For twelve years, Katrina held all the “most horrible, most expensive” titles for U.S. hurricanes. When the monster storm slammed into Mississippi’s Gulf Coast in 2005, public health physician Robert Travnicek, MD, MPH, firmly faced the disaster. In Katrina, Mississippi: Voices from Ground Zero, Doctor Travnicek and other first responders reveal what really happened during Katrina: what they did to get ready, how they managed from inside the emergency operations centers in Hancock and Harrison Counties, the catastrophic destruction they dealt with for several years to come.
This book focuses on fatness as one of the most important risk factors for heart disease, revealed through 40+ years of studying children as they’ve aged, grown fatter over time, and developed risk factors leading to such chronic conditions as hypertension, high blood cholesterol, and diabetes. Along with smoking and physical inactivity, those “risk factors” lead to chronic diseases that kill or disable seven of every 10 people in the United States, adversely affecting the quality of life of some 90 million Americans. Risk factors and poor lifestyles that cause these ills begin in childhood.
