Former Harvard Squash Champion Ivy Pochoda Pens Her Second Novel       
by Rob Dinerman


July 8, 2013 -  “Visitation Street,” the second novel authored by 1998 U. S. Intercollegiate Individuals champion Ivy Pochoda, will be released tomorrow. Based in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, not far from where Pochoda grew up as a member of the vaunted Heights Casino junior program that during the 1980’s and 1990’s produced a number of USSRA national junior championships (four of which Pochoda herself won), the book utilizes a single explosive episode --- two teenage girls take a raft out into the nearby bay and only one returns, bloody and unconscious --- to explore the shifting social cross-currents of this evolving neighborhood.
 
   Pochoda, whose prior novel, “The Art Of Disappearing,” was published in 2009, played a major role on three Harvard national team champions, earning all-American honors all four years, capping off her senior year by winning the Individuals. She also played on five USA teams in international competition, three of which earned team golds in the Pan American Federation Cup, and spent several years based in Amsterdam and competing on the women’s pro circuit, rising to as high as No. 38 on the WISPA (now WSA) tour. From July 9th through August 2nd, she has scheduled a book tour that will encompass 16 stops (see the web site ivypochoda.com for details), many of them in the northeast corridor and California, where she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Justin Nowell.