What will Kentucky Book Festival visitors find on your table?
I plan to have the following items on my table:
- Copies of Mr. Tux and the Little Garden Hotel.
- Copies of my previous book, The Peacemakers.
- Postcards and bookmarks
- A Jekca (Lego-like) model of a tuxedo cat.
Whom do you invite to stop by? Who will benefit from reading your book?
- For Mr. Tux – Children ages 7 – 10 and their adults.
- For The Peacemakers – Middle Grade and Middle School readers and their adults.
- Colleagues from Kentucky State Poetry Society and Marcia Thornton Jones’s Writing Kids Books classes.
- Other writers connected with Shadelandhouse Modern Press
Could you please tell us something curious about you and/or your book?
Mr. Tux and the Little Garden Hotel was inspired by a stay at small hotel in central France. I thought that the breakfast room at the hotel was quite charming, but lacked one thing—a cat. My husband, Bill, challenged me to “write a story and put the cat in the hotel.” That night we checked into a chateau near the French/Spanish border. The count was at home and recommended that we follow a track up through a neighboring cow pasture, promising we would find a restaurant at the end of the path. The count was true to his word. While we sipped on hard cider and ate a hearty meal at a fine French restaurant, I told Bill the story of Mr. Tux and the Little Garden Hotel.
Is this your first time participating in Kentucky Book Festival? If yes – what are you looking forward to the most? If you’ve participated before – what was your favorite experience at the Festival?
I participated in the Kentucky Book Festival in 2021 with my Middle Grade historical fiction book, The Peacemakers. The things I enjoyed most were meeting other writers of books for children and visiting with other Kentucky writers that I knew.
