Copeland has held many jobs throughout his life consisting of a probation counselor, a parole officer in Augusta, and also a disability adjudicator for people seeking social security in Atlanta.
Perhaps it is an affirmation of the human spirit's ability to empathize that the novel was conceived and written by an author with a passion for historical clarity.
It is my honor and pleasure to recognize Ashes to the Vistula and Bill Copeland for his outstanding achievement in Historical Fiction.
"[2] Copeland was a man of many passions; however, some of his favorite things to write about were the Holocaust, World War II, Native Americans and many other topics.
It was not easy for Copeland to get his works published as he did countless research online, joined different writing groups and talked with fellow writers.
Seek the night; find solace in shadows and observe a quieter world free of probing eyes and questioning stares...
A tree, gnarled and twisted, points to the wind's goal bowing after this majesty... Ashes to the Vistula (2007) is perhaps Copeland's most well known novel.
Tyrants rose from the muck cloaked in black, adorning death heads stone faces masking evil hiding sinister intentions.
To the showers the ruse portrays no diseases here crowding together walking slowly on the ashes of kin...[7] Other famous holocaust poets are Mahmoud Darwish and Martin Niemoller.
Copeland uses vivid details in all of his poems, especially the holocaust ones, and part of the reason for this is his extensive research that he put into whatever he was talking about.
Copeland's first interview was with Private First Class Russell Scott, a member of the 802nd Field Artillery Battalion.
It becomes obvious where Copeland got his gruesome dialect for his poems as during part of the interview PFC Russell Scott states that: "What did I think when I saw them?
[8] In Copeland's second interview with Petty Officer Bill York of the US Navy, it becomes clear where a lot of the emotional aspects to the poetry comes from.
"-Corporal Theodore Suroweic Not only does this interview depict the agony of having to watch ones fellow soldiers being slaughtered, but also how it feels to be personally brutalized.
[10] Author Sandra J. Cropsey on Ashes to the Vistula "Mr. Copeland could have bombarded his readers with one atrocity after another," she wrote, "but instead he carefully controls the story while at the same time giving his readers a glimpse into the misery and inhumanity of the Holocaust enough to remind us that we should never forget history, lest we surely repeat it.
On many issues, Bill Copeland leaves the jury out, enabling the reader to empathise with the dilemmas that confronted wartime and immediate post-war experience.
Though it is primarily plot-led, the plot is genuinely surprising, ultimately engaging and, in a few late chapters, both confronts and rounds off several themes that the reader has registered throughout the narrative.