Reva Russell English
Reva lives in Lexington, Kentucky with her partner and child, some chickens, and a cat named Sir Pizza. She is a writer, musician (Small Batch, Italian Beaches, The Reva Dawn Salon, Gretel), farmer/forager (Future Farm, and a student/practitioner of herbal medicine. Her writings and music can be found scattered across the internet and in many high-quality regional journals, including Glass Mountain, The Canelands, and Susurrus Magazine. Her debut novel, Two Hearts, Two Mouths, was published May 2026, on Compass Press, the only university press housed at a community college in the United States.
Featured Book
Two Hearts, Two Mouths
For three years, Alma Carlile has been switching daily between two lives in two distinct versions of Lexington, Kentucky. Unhappily married in one world and in love with someone else in the other, a pregnancy in both realities forces her to confront herself and her bifurcated life. She hatches a plan to end the back and forth. Will she get what she wants or become trapped forever in the world she longs to escape?
Across the same timeline and in the same two worlds, Alma’s one true friend and elder, Lucky Parnell, negotiates the complexities and desires of her own lives but without the vantage point of knowing herself across both. A successful restaurateur, she finds herself longing for physical and spiritual communion with another but worries age has put happiness beyond her reach. Love presents itself. Will her own fear and doubt keep her alone?
Throughout it all, a Greek chorus (with a Kentucky bent) comments and gestures toward the wonder and strangeness of life, regardless of who is living it or what can truly be known. A criss-crossing story of memory, desire, chosen family, and epistemology, Two Hearts, Two Mouths explores the tensions between what women want, what we can get, and who we can count on.
Meet Reva Russell English and get a copy of their book at the 2026 Kentucky Book Festival, Saturday, November 7, 2026, at Joseph-Beth Booksellers.