About Kylee
Kylee Pastore Asirvatham is a writer, editor, and educator whose work examines spirituality, culture, and storycraft across page and screen. Her publications include “Consider the Parachute” (Mockingbird Blog, 2025); “What is Real?” (Mockingbird Magazine, 2025); The Blinking Cursor and the Purpose of Pedagogy: writing slowly in an efficient world (CCNY Div of Humanities & Arts Blog, 2026); and the coming-of-age crime novel Good Blood (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2018), which received an Honorable Mention in the New York Screenwriting Awards for its TV pilot screenplay adaptation. In her professional life, she serves as Communications & Events Specialist for the Division of Humanities & the Arts at The City College of New York (CCNY), where she edits and writes their bi-weekly newsletter. She teaches as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at CCNY—recognized with the department’s Teacher-Writer Award in 2024—while guest lecturing for academic and public audiences on theology and film, spirituality and mental health, and creative writing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from CCNY, a Master of Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary, and is an alumna of the Act One Hollywood Screenwriters Program. Currently, she is developing essays on grace and forgiveness in both independent and blockbuster films, with works-in-progress on Frankenstein, Anemone, and Rental Family. Raised in New Castle, Pennsylvania, Kylee now resides in New York City.
About Good Blood
According to Rosemary Luce, 1968 Mahoningtown, Pennsylvania, was as true as the movie’s exaggerations–a flash of technicolored bliss. But under the falling soot of train engines and steel mill stacks her vibrant Italian-American community is riddled with morbid secrets. Eleven-year-old Rosie’s curiosity in a mysterious group of men precipitates her discovery of the Italian Mafia. When she gets caught in the Mafia’s path she learns that her honorable and honest family has incestuous Mafia ties. And, the golden age of the mob is coming to a self-detonating end. Her struggle to rescue her family from its generational curse begins to blur her own distinctions between corruption and justice, good and evil, sin and saving. In her journey, she discovers the power of friendship, the consequences of evil, and the hard decisions that come with unconditional love.
“‘Flannery O’Connor meet The Godfather‘—that’s how I’d describe Pastore’s gripping debut novel, Good Blood. Full of insight and intrigue, this haunting tale follows a girl coming of age in a ‘family’ that is both more and less than what she imagined.”
—Sandra Glahn, author of Vindicating the Vixons, Lethal Harvest, and more
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“And, certainly, to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.”
– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Kylee Pastore Asirvatham 