2020 Author Lineup
Find information about each author participating in the Kentucky Book Festival Online experience this year. Learn about their latest books and find links to purchase them on our bookseller’s website. Click “Tiled View” for a snapshot of featured books, or choose “Row View” to see info about the book and author together. To filter by genre, click the genre you prefer to view from the list below.
Non-Fiction | Fiction | Poetry | Children’s | Young Adult
Friends Kerry and Zack can’t get enough of their favorite superhero, a bow-and-arrow-toting character named Brave Bowie. His magic arrows always save the day. But when the friends sign up for archery lessons, they soon learn that practice and hard work make real-life archers great in the sport, not cartoon tricks.
Shawn Pryor is the creator and co-author of the graphic novel mystery series Cash and Carrie, co-creator and author of the 2019 GLYPH-nominated football/drama series Force, and author of Kentucky Kaiju and Jake Maddox: Diamond Double Play.
Duncan the Dragon loves to read. When he reads a story, his imagination catches fire! Unfortunately, so does his book. Duncan just wants to get to those two wonderful words, like the last sip of a chocolate milk shake: “The End.” Will he ever find out how the story ends? This bright, warm tale champions determination, friendship, and a love for books. And chocolate milk shakes!
Amanda Driscoll is a graphic designer and has been an artist in one form or another her entire life. She is the author and illustrator of Duncan the Story Dragon, Wally Does Not Want a Haircut, and Klondike, Do Not Eat Those Cupcakes.
Meet Haggis and Tank–two dogs with BIG imaginations! This series is part of Scholastic’s early chapter book line called Branches, which is aimed at newly independent readers. With easy-to-read text, high-interest content, fast-paced plots, and illustrations on every page, these books will boost reading confidence and stamina. Branches books help readers grow!
Jessica Young is the author of the award-winning My Blue is Happy, Play this Book and Pet this Book, the Haggis and Tank Unleashed series, the Finley Flowers series, Spy Guy the Not-So-Secret Agent, A Wish is a Seed, the Fairlight Friends series, and I’ll Meet You in Your Dreams.
The September Book Bundle features Crystal Wilkinson’s “Perfect Black.” From the foreword, written by Nikky Finney: “…Perfect Black is a book of poems and legends about ancestry, culture, and the terrain of a Black girl becoming. It is a narrow and spacious terrain that enters the bloodstream of this black writing girl’s body early. It is a country that she never truly exits even though different zip codes continue to fly through her wild, wondrous, winding life. We read and we hold on too.”
Crystal Wilkinson is the author of The Birds of Opulence, Blackberries, Blackberries, winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature, and Water Street, a finalist for both the UK’s Orange Prize for Fiction and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. The winner of the 2008 Denny Plattner Award in Poetry from Appalachian Heritage magazine and the Sallie Bingham Award from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, she serves as associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky.
May’s Book Bundle features Chef Ouita Michel’s “Just a Few Miles South.” “Just a Few Miles South” serves up the recipes that patrons of Michel’s restaurants have come to know and love, including the Bluegrass Benedict breakfast sandwich, Ouita’s Sardou Panini, Wallace Station’s Creamy Chicken and Mushroom Soup, and Honeywood’s Hoecake Burger. Some dishes offer creative twists on classics, like the Inside Out Hot Brown, the Wallace Cubano, or the Bourbon Banh Mi. Throughout, the chefs responsible for these delicious creations share the rich traditions and stories behind the recipes. When you can’t get down to your favorite place, this book will help you bring home the aroma, the flavors, and the love of fresh foods made with locally sourced ingredients—and share it all with friends and family.
Ouita Michel is a six-time James Beard Foundation Award nominee, including nominations for Outstanding Restaurateur and Best Chef Southeast. Michel and her restaurants are regularly featured in local and national media, such as the New York Times, Southern Living, Garden & Gun, Food Network, and the Cooking Channel. She was a guest judge on Bravo’s Top Chef series. She lives in Midway, Kentucky. Sara Gibbs is a chef as well as a recipe writer and editor. She lives in Central Florida. Genie Graf is the special projects director at the Ouita Michel Family of Restaurants. She lives in Midway, Kentucky.
March’s Book Bundle features Silas House’s debut novel, “Clay’s Quilt” along with specialty items designed by Louisville artist Rachael Sinclair. In “Clay’s Quilt,” now a touchstone for his many fans, House takes us to Free Creek, KY, where a motherless young man forges his path to adulthood surrounded by ancient mountains and his blood relatives and adopted kin: his Aunt Easter tied to her faith and foreboding nature; his Uncle Paul, the quilter; Evangeline and her sister Alma’, a fiddler whose music calls to Clay’s heart.
Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels, one book of creative nonfiction, and three plays. His writing has appeared frequently in the New York Times and has been published in Time, Newsday, Garden and Gun, Oxford American, and many other places.
July’s Book Bundle features David Bell’s newest novel, Kill All Your Darlings, along with art from Bowling Green based artist Matthew Taylor Wilson.After years of struggling to write following the deaths of his wife and son, English professor Connor Nye publishes his first novel, a thriller about the murder of a young woman. There’s just one problem: Connor didn’t write the book. His missing student did. And then she appears on his doorstep, alive and well, threatening to expose him.
David Bell is a USA Today bestselling, award-winning author whose work has been translated into multiple foreign languages. He’s currently a professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he directs the MFA program.
This fall, #1 New York Times bestselling author and romance writing legend Christine Feehan returns to her fan-favorite Leopard Series with LEOPARD’S RAGE (Berkley Jove Mass Market; November 10, 2020). When Leopard shifter Sevastyan Amurov finds his soulmate, his love will be put to the test by the danger that lies in her wake.
Christine Feehan is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 80 novels, including the Carpathian series, the GhostWalker series, the Leopard series, the Torpedo Ink series, and the Shadow Rider series.
Today, the name Marion Miley is largely unrecognizable, but in the fall of 1941, she was an internationally renowned golf champion, winning every leading women’s tournament except the elusive national title. This unassuming twenty-seven-year-old woman was beloved by all she met, including celebrities like jazz crooner Bing Crosby.
Beverly Bell is an award-winning magazine and crime writer whose work has appeared in Arizona Highways, Indianapolis Monthly, Keeneland Magazine, and Kentucky Monthly. Bell is also a featured consultant in Kentucky Education Television’s recent documentary Forgotten Fame: The Marion Miley Story.
#1 New York Times bestselling author J.R. Ward is heating things up this winter with a holiday novel featuring some of her most iconic Black Dagger Brothers.Featuring one of the Black Dagger Brotherhood’s most iconic couples, Blay and Qhuinn find themselves looking forward to their official mating ceremony.
J.R. Ward is the author of more than thirty novels, including those in her #1 New York Times bestselling Black Dagger Brotherhood series.
A deeply human story, Fentanyl, Inc. is the first deep-dive investigation of a hazardous and illicit industry that has created a worldwide epidemic, ravaging communities and overwhelming and confounding government agencies that are challenged to combat it. “A whole new crop of chemicals is radically changing the recreational drug landscape,” writes Ben Westhoff.
Ben Westhoff is an award-winning investigative reporter who has covered stories ranging from Los Angeles gangsta rap to Native American tribal disputes to government corruption.
Death in Mud Lick is the story of a pharmacy in Kermit, West Virginia, that distributed 12 million opioid pain pills in three years to a town with a population of 382 people–and of one woman, desperate for justice, after losing her brother to overdose.
Eric Eyre has been a newspaper reporter in West Virginia since 1998. In 2017, his investigation into massive shipments of opioids to the state’s southern coalfields was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Decades ago, a grassroots uprising forced Congress to enact long-overdue legislation designed to virtually eradicate black lung disease and provide fair compensation to coal miners stricken with the illness. Today, however, both promises remain unfulfilled.
Chris Hamby is an investigative reporter at The New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 2014 and was a finalist for the prize in international reporting in 2017.
Father-ish: adjective. When a man is trying his best. Clint Edwards equates fatherhood to the time he did an important live TV interview from home: To the viewers, he looked put-together in a nice button-up shirt . . . but below the camera he wasn’t wearing any pants. And it may have looked like he was in a nice office, but he was in fact hidden in his bedroom closet because his whole house was too messy to show.
Clint Edwards is the author of I’m Sorry . . . Love, Your Husband and Silence is a Scary Sound and the creator of No Idea What I’m Doing: A Daddy Blog.
From the acclaimed author of the classics Shiloh and Other Stories and In Country comes a beautifully crafted and profoundly moving novel which follows a woman as she looks back over her life and her first love. Ann Workman is smart but naïve, a misfit who’s traveled from rural Kentucky to graduate school in the transformative years of the late 1960s.
Bobbie Ann Mason is the author of a number of works of fiction, including The Girl in the Blue Beret, In Country, An Atomic Romance, and Nancy Culpepper. The groundbreaking Shiloh and Other Stories won the PEN Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the PEN Faulkner Award. Her memoir, Clear Springs, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Jake Brigance is back! The hero of A Time to Kill, one of the most popular novels of our time, returns in a courtroom drama that showcases #1 New York Times bestselling author John Grisham at the height of his storytelling powers. Clanton, Mississippi. 1990.
John Grisham is the author of thirty-five novels, one work of non-fiction, a collection of stories, and seven novels for young readers.
Nat Turner, an enslaved black man, believed he was chosen by God to battle against the evils of slavery. Driven by visions, Turner banded with six others, and on August 22, 1831, his rebellion began with attacks at plantations in Southampton, Virginia.
Shawn Pryor is the creator and co-author of the graphic novel mystery series Cash and Carrie, co-creator and author of the 2019 GLYPH-nominated football/drama series Force, and author of Kentucky Kaiju and Jake Maddox: Diamond Double Play.
When Meade Macon goes to a convention for his doubles from parallel Earths, he just can’t compete—his counterparts are smarter, cooler and better all around.
S.G. Wilson is the author of the middle-grade series, Me vs. The Multiverse. The first in the series, Pleased to Meet Me, came out in August.
Accents Publishing is proud bring to you Masked Man, Black by iconic poet Frank X Walker, the author of two other Accents Publishing books: Last Will, Last Testament and About Flight. The poems in this new collection pack the immediacy and gravity of letters from the trenches of a war. What is at stake here is our humanity, dignity, way of life, our relationship to the truth.
A native of Danville, Kentucky, Frank X Walker is the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate. Walker has published ten collections of poetry, including Last Will, Last Testament, winner of the 2020 Judy Gaines Young Book Award, Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the Black Caucus American Library Association Honor Award for Poetry.
Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life.
Nikky Finney was born by the sea in South Carolina and raised during the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movements. She is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze; Rice; The World Is Round; and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011.
A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys “the visceral effect that prison has on identity” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems “canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace” and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life.
A poet, essayist and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, Reginald Dwayne Betts writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society.
A searing, on-the-ground examination of the coal industry–and the workers left behind–in the midst of an environmental crisis, addiction, and rising white nationalism. The past few years have highlighted the paradox at the heart of coal country.
Jeff Young is the managing editor of Ohio Valley ReSource, a regional journalism collaborative reporting on economic and social change in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. The ReSource includes seven public media outlets across the three states, and aims to strengthen news coverage of the area’s most important issues.
Soon to be a major television event, the nail-biting climax of one of the greatest political battles in American history: the ratification of the constitutional amendment that granted women the right to vote. Nashville, August 1920.
Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist and writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Times, and The Christian Science Monitor, as well as in reports and documentaries for National Public Radio and Voice of America.
In Ailing in Place, Michele Morrone explores the relationship between environmental conditions in Appalachia and health outcomes that are too often ascribed to individual choices only. She applies quantitative data to observations from environmental health professionals to frame the ways in which the environment, as a social determinant of health, leads to health disparities in Appalachian communities.
Dr. Morrone is a Professor of Environmental Health at Ohio University, Chair of the Department of Social and Public Health, and the Director of the Appalachian Rural Health Institute. She earned a Ph.D. in environmental planning from The Ohio State University, an M.S. in forest resources from the University of New Hampshire, and a B.S. in natural resources from The Ohio State University. Dr. Morrone previously served as the Chief of the Office of Environmental Education at the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about publishing but were too afraid to ask is right here in this funny, candid guide written by an acclaimed author. There are countless books on the market about how to write better but very few books on how to break into the marketplace with your first book.
Courtney Maum is the author of the novels “Costalegre” (a GOOP book club pick and one of Glamour Magazine’s top books of the decade), “I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You” and “Touch” (a “New York Times” Editor’s Choice and NPR Best Book of the Year selection), the popular guidebook “Before and After the Book Deal: A writer’s guide to finishing, publishing, promoting, and surviving your first book,” and the forthcoming memoir, “The Year of the Horses.”
Many Kentuckians and fans of intercollegiate athletics are familiar with the name Jim Host. As founder and CEO of Host Communications, he was the pioneer in college sports marketing.
Jim Host is founder of Host Communications, Inc., a nationally renowned college sports marketing and association management company. He grew up in Kentucky and played baseball at the University of Kentucky before joining the Chicago White Sox farm system.
Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell’s murderer was acquitted–thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the Reverend.
Casey Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in English, she earned an M.Phil in theology at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery.
David W. Blight is the Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.
In February 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy ventured deep into the heart of eastern Kentucky to gauge the progress of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. In All This Marvelous Potential, author Matthew Algeo meticulously retraces RFK’s tour of eastern Kentucky and explains how and why the region has changed since 1968—and why it matters for the rest of the country.
Matthew Algeo is an award-winning journalist and author. He has reported from four continents, and he is the author of six books.
The epic history of African American women’s pursuit of political power–and how it transformed America. In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women’s movement did not win the vote for most black women.
Martha S. Jones is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how Black Americans have shaped the history of democracy.
After the 2016 presidential election, popular media branded Appalachia as “Trump Country,” decrying its inhabitants as ignorant fearmongers voting against their own interests. And since the 1880s, there have been many, including travel writers and absentee landowners, who have framed mountain people as uneducated and hostile.
Samantha NeCamp is assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, studying Appalachian and immigrant rhetorics and literacies. She is the author of Adult Literacy and American Identity: The Moonlight Schools and Americanization Programs.
In A Simple Justice, Melanie Beals Goan offers a new and deeper understanding of the women’s suffrage movement in Kentucky. Women’s suffrage was not simply a question of whether women could and should vote; it carried more serious implications for white supremacy and for the balance of federal and state powers.
Melanie Beals Goan is an associate professor of history at the University of Kentucky specializing in women’s history in the United States. She is the author of Mary Breckinridge: The Frontier Nursing Service and Rural Health in Appalachia
A cinematic Reconstruction-era drama of violence and fraught moral reckoning. In Dawson’s Fall, a novel based on the lives of Roxana Robinson’s great-grandparents, we see America at its most fragile, fraught, and malleable. Set in 1889, in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson’s tale weaves her family’s journal entries and letters with a novelist’s narrative grace, and spans the life of her tragic hero, Frank Dawson, as he attempts to navigate the country’s new political, social, and moral landscape.
Roxana Robinson is the author of more than ten books, including the novels Sparta and Cost; short story collections; and the biography Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Vogue, among other publications.
Nineteen-year-old Cowney Sequoyah yearns to escape his hometown of Cherokee, North Carolina, in the heart of the Smoky Mountains. When a summer job at Asheville’s luxurious Grove Park Inn and Resort brings him one step closer to escaping the hills that both cradle and suffocate him, he sees it as an opportunity.
Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), holds degrees from Yale University and the College of William and Mary.
Hope blooms anew for the Four Lands in this riveting conclusion, not only to the Fall of Shannara series but to the entire Shannara saga–a truly landmark event over forty years in the making! Since he first began the Shannara saga in 1977, Terry Brooks has had a clear idea of how the series should end, and now that moment is at hand. As the Four Lands reels under the Skaar invasion–spearheaded by a warlike people determined to make this land their own–our heroes must decide what they will risk to save the integrity of their home.
Terry Brooks has thrilled readers for decades with his powers of imagination and storytelling. He is the author of more than thirty books, most of which have been New York Times bestsellers. He lives with his wife, Judine, in the Pacific Northwest.
From the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Maud’s Line, an epic novel that follows a web of complex family alliances and culture clashes in the Cherokee Nation during the aftermath of the Civil War, and the unforgettable woman at its center. Winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award (Best Western Traditional Novel). It’s the early spring of 1875 in the Cherokee Nation West. A baby, a black hired hand, a bay horse, a gun, a gold stash, and a preacher have all gone missing.
Margaret Verble is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Her first novel, Maud’s Line, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
The events Gipe chronicles are frantic. They are told through a voice by turns taciturn and angry, yet also balanced with humor and stoic grace. Weedeater is a story about how we put our lives back together when we lose the things we thought we couldn’t bear losing, how we find new purpose in what we thought were scraps and trash caught in the weeds.
Robert Gipe won the 2015 Weatherford Award for outstanding Appalachian novel for his first novel Trampoline. His second novel is Weedeater (2018). Both novels were published by Ohio University Press.
In her rural Appalachian holler, ten-year-old Misty’s closest friends are the crawdads. Misty can speak to them, to the birds, to the creek, to everything outside, and she understands how they think. She knows that if she could just speak to her parents in the same way, she could stop all the fighting.
Ashley Blooms has published short fiction in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Shimmer, among others, and her essay ‘Fire in My Bones’ appeared in The Oxford American.
Miracelle Loving’s world comes crashing down when her mother, Ruby, is murdered during a fortune-telling session gone wrong. Not that she had much of a stable world to lose in the first place; the free-spirited mother-daughter duo had never remained in one place for very long. Without the guidance of her mother, Miracelle grows up following the only path she knows, traveling from town to town, sometimes fortune-telling, picking up odd jobs to fill the time and escape the ever-present lostness she can’t seem to run far enough away from.
Karen Salyer McElmurray won an AWP Award for creative nonfiction for her book Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey and the Orison Award for creative nonfiction for her essay “Blue Glass.”
In World War II-era rural Kentucky, twenty-two-year-old Easter and Anneth, her teenaged sister, lose their parents young, so they must raise each other. Easter finds her life in the Pentecostal Holiness church and its music, while Anneth dances and drinks in less-than-holy honky-tonks.
Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels, one book of creative nonfiction, and three plays. His writing has appeared frequently in the New York Times and has been published in Time, Newsday, Garden and Gun, Oxford American, and many other places.
In the late 1800s, three sisters use witchcraft to change the course of history in Alix E. Harrow’s powerful novel of magic and the suffragette movement. In 1893, there’s no such thing as witches. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy charms and nursery rhymes.
Alix E. Harrow is an ex-historian with lots of opinions and excessive library fines, currently living in Kentucky with her husband and their semi-feral children. She won a Hugo for her short fiction, and has been nominated for the Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards.
A bold, lyrical collection of poems that highlight some of the most celebrated activists from around the world and throughout history. In the face of injustice, the world has always looked to brave individuals to speak up and spark change. Nelson Mandela used his voice to bring down Apartheid. Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birutè Galdikas gave a voice to the primates who couldn’t speak for themselves.
George Ella Lyon is an award-winning poet and author. She has written more than 35 books for young readers, including the Schneider Family Book Award-winning picture book The Pirate of Kindergarten and the young adult novel Sonny’s House of Spies, as well as numerous books for adults. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
Kristin O’Donnell Tubb, the award-winning author of A Dog Like Daisy, delivers another heartwarming must-read middle grade novel for dog lovers. Equal parts funny and poignant, this book from the point of view of the service dog, Zeus, is perfect for fans of Max and A Dog Called Homeless. Zeus comes from a long line of heroic dogs, and he dreams of glory as a K9 commander. But he receives a much more dangerous assignment–middle school! And as all good service dogs know, the only way to get through hostile territory is by being invisible.
Kristin O’Donnell Tubb is the author of The Story Collector and The Story Seeker, the award-winning A Dog Like Daisy, John Lincoln Clem: Civil War Drummer Boy (written as E. F. Abbott), The 13th Sign, Selling Hope, and Autumn Winifred Oliver Does Things Different.
After her last assignment went horribly wrong, everyone tells FBI Special Agent Lexie Montgomery she needs a break. But Lexie is determined to keep going with her undercover work-so when a Dutch constable goes missing, she jumps at the chance. Along with Blake Bennett, her unfamiliar new partner, Lexie is thrown into the Gathering, a haven for environmental activists planning illegal activity.
Dana Ridenour is the award-winning author of the Lexie Montgomery FBI series. She is a retired FBI agent who spent most of her career as an FBI undercover operative. Born and raised in Kentucky, she now lives in Beaufort, South Carolina, but still cheers for her beloved Wildcats.
An anthology of 14 mystery stories, each by a different writer, each set in a different central Ohio neighborhood. It’s the 101st release in Akashic Books’ award-winning noir series.
Andrew Welsh-Huggins is the author of six mysteries featuring Andy Hayes, a former Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned private eye.
In Until I Find You, celebrated author Rea Frey brings you her most explosive, emotional, taut domestic drama yet about the powerful bond between mothers and children…and how far one woman will go to bring her son home. 2 floors. 55 steps to go up. 40 more to the crib.
Rea Frey is the multi-published, award-winning bestselling author of three suspense novels and four nonfiction books. She’s been featured in US Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, Popsugar, Hello Sunshine, Marie Claire, Parade, Shape, Hello Giggles, CrimeReads, Writer’s Digest, WGN, Fox News, Today in Nashville, Talk of the Town, and more.
Ryan Francis has it all–great job, wonderful wife, beautiful child–and he loves posting photos of his perfect life on social media. Until the night his friend Blake asks him to break into a woman’s home to retrieve incriminating items that implicate Blake in an affair. Ryan refuses to help, but when Blake threatens to reveal Ryan’s darkest secret–which could jeopardize everything in Ryan’s life–Ryan has no choice but to honor Blake’s request.
David Bell is the USA Today bestselling author of ten novels from Berkley/Penguin, including The Request, Layover, Somebody’s Daughter, Bring Her Home, Since She Went Away, Somebody I Used to Know, The Forgotten Girl, Never Come Back, The Hiding Place, and Cemetery Girl.
With stark poignancy and political dispassion Tightrope addresses the crisis in working-class America while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure. Drawing us deep into an “other America,” the authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the people with whom Kristof grew up, in rural Yamhill, Oregon. It’s an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared.
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the first husband and wife to share a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, have coauthored four previous books: A Path Appears, Half the Sky, Thunder from the East, and China Wakes.
Sixth-grader Brad makes the mistake of drawing instead of paying attention in class. When Brad’s parents ground him from drawing, his bratty little brother Daley rubs it in. Later that night, Brad is surprised when a mysterious crow delivers a pen to his bedroom window.
Jason is an army brat who grew up moving around a total of seven times on military bases from Germany to Fort Knox, Kentucky, and made friends by writing stories starring the kids in each new school. In his free time Jason can be found enjoying 1980’s music and popular culture, watching Marvel movies, and is working on visiting all the MLB baseball stadiums.
Alex is a baseball player. A great one. His papi is pushing him to go pro, but Alex maybe wants to be a poet. Not that Papi would understand or allow that. Isa is a dancer. She’d love to go pro, if only her Havana-born mom weren’t dead set against it…just like she’s dead set against her daughter falling for a Latino.
Ismée Williams is a pediatric cardiologist by day and an accomplished author by night. Her first book with Abrams, Water in May, was released in 2017 to critical acclaim. She lives in New York City.
In this heartfelt and hilarious new novel from Greg Howard, an enterprising boy starts his own junior talent agency and signs a thirteen-year-old aspiring drag queen as his first client. Twelve-year-old Mikey Pruitt–president, founder, and CEO of Anything, Inc.–has always been an entrepreneur at heart. Inspired by his grandfather Pap Pruitt, who successfully ran all sorts of businesses from a car wash to a roadside peanut stand, Mikey is still looking for his million-dollar idea.
Greg Howard was born and raised in the South Carolina Lowcountry, where his love of words and stories blossomed at a young age. Originally set on becoming a songwriter, Greg followed that dream to the bright lights of Nashville, Tennessee, and spent years producing the music of others before eventually returning to his childhood passion of writing stories.
In this lyrical coming-of-age story about family, sisterhood, music, race, and identity, Mariama J. Lockington draws on some of the emotional truths from her own experiences growing up with an adoptive white family. I am a girl but most days I feel like a question mark. Makeda June Kirkland is eleven years old, adopted, and black. Her parents and big sister are white, and even though she loves her family very much, Makeda often feels left out.
Mariama J. Lockington is an adoptee, author, and nonprofit educator. She has been telling stories and making her own books since the second grade, when she wore shortalls and flower leggings every day to school.
In 1848, Mary Walker was born into slavery. At age 15, she was freed, and by age 20, she was married and had her first child. By age 68, she had worked numerous jobs, including cooking, cleaning, babysitting, and selling sandwiches to raise money for her church.
Rita Lorraine Hubbard is the author of a number of nonfiction books for adults and runs the children’s book review site Picture Book Depot.
Snow! Snow! And more snow! Oscar was itching to go outside and no one was awake, not even his boy Matt. When Oscar finally gets out to play, he can’t resist the chance to run away and pursue his own wintry escapades- all with the help of his new friend Daisy.
Will Hillenbrand is a celebrated children’s author and illustrator whose works include Snow Friends, his 70th book which will be published in October 2020.
Adelaide loves writing. Bear loves writing. But Theo does NOT love writing. Thankfully, Adelaide and Bear are ready to team up and persuade the entire class, including Mrs. Fitz-Pea, that Bears make the best writing buddies.
Carmen Oliver is the author of the picture book series Bears Make the Best Buddies (Reading, Math, Writing, and Science) as well as the nonfiction picture book biography A Voice for the Spirit Bears: How One Boy Inspired Millions to Save a Rare Animal, a Junior Library Guild spring 2019 pick.
A Wish is a Seed is a celebration of the power and potential of hope often hidden in small packages and unexpected places.
Jessica Young is the author of the award-winning My Blue is Happy, Play this Book and Pet this Book, the Haggis and Tank Unleashed series, the Finley Flowers series, Spy Guy the Not-So-Secret Agent, A Wish is a Seed, the Fairlight Friends series, and I’ll Meet You in Your Dreams.
In her new collection And Luckier, poet Leatha Kendrick offers us an unflinching and holistic look at our world. Her poems are full of humanity, honestly set in that place where it is “impossible to separate / misery and joy—the living edge of mystery.”
Recipient of two Al Smith Fellowships and the Sallie Bingham Award, Leatha Kendrick’s fifth collection of poems is And Luckier (Accents Publishing, 2020).
Part Savvy Lit Crit, part Blues chart, part hip revenge-femme-lyric, part imagined Interracial Romance Saga disguised as poems, In Lucy Negro, Redux: The Bard, a Book, and a Ballet, poet Caroline Randall Williams plays the literary Race Card and cuts the whole deck, moving backwards in time in and forward in mind, archeologically offering a precise and seductive command performance of the hidden temperament of a specific and beautiful “Dark Lady” “both used and loved.
Caroline Randall Williams is a multi-genre writer and educator in Nashville Tennessee. She is co-author of the Phyllis Wheatley Award-winning young adult novel The Diary of B.B. Bright, and the NAACP Image Award-winning cookbook Soul Food Love.
Under the Ocelot Sun is an illustrated poem for all ages in which a parent tells a daughter the story of who she is and why they have left Honduras to walk to the US border in search of asylum. (Bilingual edition: English and Spanish)
Jeremy D. Paden is a poet and professor at the Transylvania University and he is on the faculty in Spalding University’s low-residence MFA. He was born in Milan, Italy and raised in Central America and the Caribbean.
Author’s fifth collection of poems.
Nana Lampton is a life-long resident of Louisville, Kentucky and a graduate of both Wellesley College, B.A., and the University of Virginia, M.A. She started working in 1966 with the company, which her grandfather founded in 1906. She is the current chairman of Hardscuffle, Inc., holding company for American Life and Accident Insurance Company of Kentucky, Sterling Thompson Company, and Hornbeam Insurance.
Three women meet in yoga class and discover that they have one thing in common: their mothers have recently passed away. As friendship blooms, the trio makes a pact to help each other sort through the belongings their mothers’ left behind.
Sheila Williams is the author of DANCING ON THE EDGE OF THE ROOF (2002, Ballantine/OneWorld) and three other novels. An avid reader, traveler and family historian, Sheila is a graduate of The University of Louisville and worked as a corporate legal assistant before prioritizing her writing activity.
Acclaimed author Colleen Oakley delivers a heart-wrenching and unforgettable love story about a woman who must choose between the man she loves and the man fate has chosen for her, in a novel that reminds us that the best life is one led by the heart. Mia Graydon’s life looks picket-fence perfect; she has the […]
Colleen Oakley is the critically acclaimed author of Before I Go, Close Enough to Touch, You Were There Too and the forthcoming The Invisible Husband of Frick Island (May 2021). Colleen’s novels have been longlisted for the Southern Book Prize twice and Close Enough to Touch won the French Reader’s Prize. Her books have been translated into 21 languages, optioned for film and have received numerous accolades.
In this whip-smart and timely novel from acclaimed author Kimmery Martin, two doctors travel a surprising path when they must choose between treating their patients and keeping their jobs. Georgia Brown’s profession as a urologist requires her to interact with plenty of naked men, but her romantic prospects have fizzled. The most important person in her life is her friend Jonah Tsukada, a funny, empathetic family medicine doctor who works at the same hospital in Charleston, South Carolina and who has become as close as family to her.
Kimmery Martin is an emergency medicine doctor-turned novelist whose works of medical fiction have been praised by The Harvard Crimson, Southern Living, and The New York Times, among others. A lifelong literary nerd, she promotes reading, interviews authors, and teaches writing seminars.
A good bottle of bourbon should be enjoyed in good company.
Peggy is a woman of many firsts. She founded PNSA and The Bourbon Women Association. She is the first woman in the world to receive the title of Master Bourbon Taster. Formerly of Brown-Forman, Peggy was their Global Event Planner for iconic brands such as Woodford Reserve.
Authors Susan Reigler and Michael Veach sampled every brand featured, documenting the flavors, tastes and smells they experienced, along with the proof, age, type, style, mash bill, color, price, nose, taste, and finish for each whiskey, and full-color photos of each bottle for easy reference.
Award-winning writer Susan Reigler, author of Kentucky Bourbon Country: The Essential Travel Guide, The Complete Guide to Kentucky State Parks, and co-author of The Kentucky Bourbon Cocktail Book, was born in Louisville. From 1992 to 2007, Reigler was a restaurant critic, beverage columnist and travel writer for the Louisville Courier-Journal and has been a judge for the James Beard Foundation Restaurant Awards since 1997.
He’s by the book. But she’s read all the books. Welcome to Little Bridge, one of the smallest, most beautiful islands in the Florida Keys, home to sandy white beaches, salt-rimmed margaritas, and stunning sunsets—a place where nothing goes under the radar and love has a way of sneaking up when least expected…A broken engagement only gave Molly Montgomery additional incentive to follow her dream job from the Colorado Rockies to the Florida Keys. Now, as Little Bridge Island Public Library’s head of children’s services, Molly hopes the messiest thing in her life will be her sticky-note covered desk.
Meg Cabot was born in Bloomington, Indiana during the Chinese astrological year of the Fire Horse, a notoriously unlucky sign, but learned at an early age that a good storyteller can always give herself a happy ending. Her 80+ books for both adults and tweens/teens have included multiple #1 New York Times bestsellers, selling over twenty-five million copies worldwide. Her Princess Diaries series has been published in more than 38 countries and was made into two hit films by Disney.
