What will Kentucky Book Festival visitors find on your table?

Echo Her Lovely Bones shares the stories of eight women who have lived in a house during its two-hundred-year history. The novel is a series of stories written by the women and left in the attic of the house. Their stories chronicle the history of women’s experiences and include actual historical events in central Kentucky.

Shadows Hold Their Breath follows Kat Turner, a character in Echo Her Lovely Bones.  Kat makes the unthinkable decision to leave her three daughters and her husband when she thinks she’s have a nervous breakdown. The story explores the consequences of that decision.

In Blessed, Grayson Armstrong’s vision for a dying church has everyone in small-town Mercy, Kentucky, talking. The truth is everyone had been talking about Grayson ever since this dark-haired twenty-eight-year-old preacher with shoulder-length hair and an ill-fitting suit drove into town twelve years before in his silver convertible with his pretty wife and two rambunctious boys. It’s his untimely death, though, that has everyone trying to understand who they thought he was.

Whom do you invite to stop by? Who will benefit from reading your book?

I’d love to see people who are looking for stories that are a little messy; that is, stories that don’t always have a tidy ending but will make them think.

Could you please tell us something curious about you and/or your book?

I grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, and the genesis for Echo Her Lovely Bones comes from two factors in my teenage years: I learned the history of the fort my high school was named after, and I babysat for a family whose house was built around the original log cabin that once stood there.

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 love meeting readers, even if they don’t choose my book. I love seeing their excitement when they’re picking up something from their favorite author or discovering a new one.