What will Kentucky Book Festival visitors find on your table?
I have two new books!
Vaulting through Time is a young adult novel about identity, daughters and mothers, time travel, gymnastics, and adoption. Elizabeth is a sixteen-year-old competitive gymnast who has always loved the bars and beam—but lately she has developed fear issues common to gymnasts (well, maybe to all of us!) about throwing her body into the air—especially over the vault. In addition, she’s developed an embarrassing crush on her best friend Zach. But it turns out that she has even bigger issues when she discovers that her mother hasn’t told her the full truth about her origins.
When a watch that she and Zach found in an abandoned house turns out to be a time machine, she has the opportunity to travel to the night of her birth to find out the truth. But the watch malfunctions and she finds herself instead visiting a gym in 1988, her own house in 1929, and a series of Olympic competitions in her process of putting together the puzzle of her past. And when an identical time machine is stolen, she has to chase the thief through time to keep her existence from being erased altogether. Elizabeth ends up at the 1988 Olympic trials where she has to perform the vault of her life to save her loved ones and herself.
Vaulting through Time was a finalist for the Montaigne Medal, the Eric Hoffer Award for YA Literature, The American Book Fest Best Book Award for YA Literature, and the Next Generation Indie Book Award in the YA category.
My other new book is The Pamela Papers: A Mostly E-pistolary Story about Academic Pandemic Pandemonium. It’s a comic novel for adults about Pamela Pankhurst, a beleaguered creative writing professor at Sanford Liberal Arts College (SLAC, home of the Slackers). When the pandemic hits, her campus shuts down and a passive-aggressive new administration with draconian policies takes over.
As her coworkers lose their will to live and the institution careens toward catastrophe, Pamela bands with two colleagues to investigate: who are these administrators who make nonsensical demands and seem to harbor vendettas against everyone? Pamela and her intrepid workmates risk their careers and their sanity as they seek to rescue their campus from dehumanization and certain ruin.
The Pamela Papers was the winner of the Next Generation Indie Award for humor/comedy.
Whom do you invite to stop by? Who will benefit from reading your book?
Young adult readers will enjoy Elizabeth’s journey of discovery in a suspenseful contemporary story that includes touches of mystery, fantasy and science fiction, romance, and historical fiction. Whether you’re a teen or adult reader, if you enjoy humorous and poignant stories about secrets and identity, follow gymnastics or compete yourself, or like time travel, Vaulting through Time is for you.
If you’ve ever worked in a dysfunctional environment–and particularly if you survived the complications of the workplace during the pandemic —The Pamela Papers is a cathartic story that will keep you laughing. Readers have referred to the book as “hilarious” and “laugh-out-loud funny.”
Could you please tell us something curious about you and/or your book?
My daughter was a competitive gymnast for eight years and Elizabeth gets her funny, fierce personality from her. I drew on my own identity questions from my teenage years as well, so Elizabeth is a composite of both of us, even though, like Elizabeth’s mom, I peaked at the cartwheel!
I wrote The Pamela Papers as a way to cope with a complete upheaval of my own workplace during the pandemic. Writing it helped me to chase away my own anxiety during that time—instead of stewing I just wrote and laughed—and I initially wanted to publish it to share with my colleagues and help us all recover from a difficult situation. I have been so pleased at the positive response of all of my coworkers, who have passed it around—but also thrilled that so many readers outside of my workplace and even outside of academia have enjoyed it and found it funny and freeing.
Is this your first time participating in Kentucky Book Festival? If yes—what are you looking forward to the most?
This is my first time, though I’ve participated in a few other book festivals. I love meeting and talking to readers of all kinds. And I love the chance to meet other writers and be introduced to their work. I don’t live in Kentucky but I’ve taught in Spalding’s graduate writing program for almost twenty years and I always think of Kentucky as kind of a second home, a place that has pushed and inspired and taught me so much about writers and writing.
