I have a long history in Kentucky with a diverse group of people who I expect will all stop by, fromlifelong family friends from Woodford County and all over the state to my University of Kentucky friends. There will surelybe many academic colleagues and friends from the Master’s program I attended at both UK and Spalding University. There will be readers and fans of my first book, June Bug Versus Hurricane who follow me on social media and all my oldLexington friends who have supported everything I have done. I expect my students to show up, as I teach for theCarnegie Center and privately and have for years and they will be very happy with the news I will have a table! Somefriends from the Shelby Society will visit, I am a member of this group of Kentucky governors and their relatives who meeta few times a year and support each other, I expect Libby and Lucy Jones and Martha Lane Collins and her son SteveCollins, who began the Shelby Society, Governor Steve Beshear (who I sat next to and got to know at the Kentucky BookFestival in 2017! My good friends and bookstore owners Michael Courtney and his wife Kim from Black Swan Books andAshlee Dennington and family from A Likely Story will surely stop by to see me. I will spread the news far and wide andwill do my best to bring a wonderful addition of visitors to the Kentucky Book Festival this year!
I believe everyone in Kentucky will benefit from reading this book. It’s an honest telling of a story that has gripped the areaand beyond through a salacious and misrepresented book The Bluegrass Conspiracy. That author did not talk to any ofthe actual participants in the crimes and aftermath that took place at this time… she talks about my family and friendsalthough she has never met them. That book still flies off shelves locally and I know all of the fans of that book will eat upthis REAL STORY TOLD BY THE REAL PEOPLE through interviews and personal accounts. All was certainly not what itseemed and still 100 times more fascinating, darker, and tangled than could have been imagined. Beyond those who arefamiliar with my uncle Brad Bryant and his partner Drew Thornton and my father Dan Chandler and the infamous Chagrabrothers from El Paso, there will be interested readers who enjoy complicated family dynamics and self-discovery in theface of contradictions between the stories we tell ourselves and the true stories. Book lovers of true crime will loveBluegrass Sons and those who like information inside our government and the lives of their spies, drug smugglersdangerous and glamorous lives. Perhaps most importantly, those who can relate to bad decisions and how they trickledown and affect generations.
This will be my second time as a participant in the Kentucky Book Festival, the first when my memoir, June Bug VersusHurricane came out. I loved getting to know everyone around me, that year I sat next to Governor Beshear and Joe KiethBickett of the Cornbread Mafia. My favorite experience was meeting Scott Pelley, the news anchor (who turned out to befrom Lubbock, Texas where I went to high school!) and Jim Acosta from CNN, buying their books and getting a picture.
What I am most looking forward to this time is meeting new authors and seeing my fellow Spalding MFA group, KathleenDriskell, Katerina Stoykova, Silas House, and Crystal Wilkinson among them, I am most looking forward to selling mybook alongside that particular literary tribe.
