UPDATE: This will be a fully virtual event. Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.
If you decide to attend and purchase the authors’ books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!
All seventeen-year-old Maggie Warshauer wants is to leave her stifled life in Filliyaw Creek behind and head to college. An outsider at school and uncertain of her own sexual identity, Maggie longs to start again somewhere new. Inspired by a long-dead biologist’s journals, scientific-minded Maggie spends her days sailing, exploring, and categorizing life around her. But when her beautiful cousin Charisse disappears on prom night and is found dead at the marina where Maggie lives, Maggie’s plans begin to unravel. A mysterious stranger begins stalking her and a local detective on the case leaves her struggling to hold on to her secrets—her father’s alcoholism, her mother’s abandonment, a boyfriend who may or may not exist, and her own actions on prom night. As the detective gets closer to finding the truth, and Maggie’s stalker is closing in, she is forced to come to terms with the one person who might hold the answers—herself.
A former farmer, sailor, and journalist, Valerie Nieman is the author of five novels, one short story collection, three collections of poetry, and two poetry chapbooks. To the Bones, her genre-bending novel about Appalachia published by West Virginia University Press in 2019, was a finalist for the Manly Wade Wellman Award and the Killer Nashville Award. Her work has appeared in dozens of journals including Monkeybicycle, StorySouth, and The Georgia Review and received fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and the NEA, among others. Nieman recently retired from teaching at North Carolina A&T. Learn more at valnieman.com.
Jamie Mason was born in Oklahoma City and grew up in Washington, DC. She’s most often reading and writing, but in the life left over, she enjoys films, Formula 1 racing, football, traveling, and, conversely, staying at home. Jamie lives with her husband and two daughters in the mountains of western North Carolina. She is the author of Three Graves Full, Monday’s Lie, and The Hidden Things.