What will Kentucky Book Festival visitors find on your table?
Visitors will find my newest novel, Someplace Like Home, which is a fictionalized account of my mother’s life. This story explores women’s issues and life in rural America through my family’s stories. Some of our stories are painful, but my overarching goal is to help inspire greater understanding and compassion across a wide range of perspectives and personal experiences. In addition, visitors will find my memoir (In the Shadow of the Valley) and my first novel (A Woman In Time). Like my latest novel, those books also explore themes of generational legacies (including generational trauma), Appalachian culture, and the universal experiences that bind all of us together.
Whom do you invite to stop by? Who will benefit from reading your book?
I honestly think most adult readers would benefit from reading my book, as we have all been touched in some way by the major social problems explored in this novel (namely poverty, domestic violence, and mental health issues). This novel is intended to reach both the people who have been impacted firsthand and those who have witnessed such problems from any distance, and I would be happy to have a conversation with anyone interested to discuss how these personal stories impact our collective wellbeing.
Could you please tell us something curious about you and/or your book?
Something curious about this book is that it’s written in three parts, each of which is written from a different narrator’s point of view. I spent a lot of time working through the best way to present this story and the major sections within it, which led to a structure that I find very interesting. I’m eager for readers to dive into these different narrative voices and to discover what each of them contributes to the story between the lines.
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?
This will be my third time participating in the Kentucky Book Festival, and I’m so excited to meet lots of readers. I always have fulfilling and inspiring conversations with people whom I otherwise wouldn’t meet, and that is one of my favorite experiences both at the festival and as an author overall.
