Derryn Moten Conversation

In my August 5 blog, “A Special Day,” I described meeting for the first time Derryn Moten, the historian whose dissertation convinced me to write Forsaken. A video of our conversation, produced by NewSouth Books, is now available. Please have a look. Derryn and I spoke about many of the issues narrator Charlie Mears ponders […]

Book Trailer

There are book trailers! Who knew? Certainly not me, wandering the savannahs of the Internet on my knuckles with my laptop in tow, like the apes in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But my publisher, NewSouth Books’ Suzanne La Rosa, thought it would be a good idea for me to produce one. Of course, […]

A Special Day

Saturday I talked with someone I’d admired for years, but had never met. Mary Leigh Howell, our three dogs, and I were on our way from Greensboro, North Carolina, to Seagrove Beach, Florida. During the drive we had an unsettling moment. In Atlanta we merged into a convoy of pickups flying Confederate battle flags, probably […]

A Farewell to Arms

Yesterday I was speaking by phone with my publisher, Suzanne La Rosa of NewSouth Books, about the book trailer storyboard I’d sent her. Since my novel Forsaken is set in 1912, photographs are available of real people and places that appear in my fictional account of the trial and execution of the African American girl, […]