< Back What You Don't See Tracy Clark September 22, 2020 Cass Raines left the Chicago Police force after a morally bankrupt cop nearly got her killed. Now she runs her own Private Detective agency. When her old CPD friend and partner, Ben Mickerson asks Cass to join him for a side gig, she’s happy to do it. Then she meets the client – the wealthy, powerful owner of a fast-growing media empire. Vonda Allen is loved by the public but hated by her employees and also by whoever is sending her death threats. Cass isn’t thrilled about babysitting a heartless diva, but when two of Vonda’s staff members are murdered, the case gets serious. Then, at one of Vonda’s book signings, a mysterious fan stabs Ben. Although Vonda fires her, Cass is worried that Ben won’t pull through. Now, there’s no way she’s going to sit this one out even though that same morally bankrupt cop and his friend are trying to trip her up. She’s hell bent on figuring out Vonda’s secrets and determined to get answers before anyone else, including Vonda, dies. Tracy Clark is the author of the highly acclaimed Chicago Mystery Series featuring ex-homicide cop turned PI Cassandra Raines, a hard-driving, African-American protagonist who works the mean streets of the Windy City dodging cops, cons, killers, and thugs. She received Anthony Award and Lefty Award nominations for her series debut, Broken Places, which was also shortlisted for the American Library Association’s RUSA Reading List, named a CrimeReads Best New PI Book of 2018, a Midwest Connections Pick, and a Library Journal Best Books of the Year. In addition to her Cass Raines novels, Tracy’s short story “For Services Rendered,” appears in the anthology Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African‑American Authors. A native of Chicago, she works as an editor in the newspaper industry and roots for the Cubs, Sox, Bulls, Bears, and Blackhawks equally. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, PI Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, and a Mystery Writers of America Midwest board member. When she isn’t working, reading or writing, Tracy loves watching old movies, especially those involving monsters. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Seven Farzana Doctor November 25, 2020 Sharifa and her husband Murtuza are spending his sabbatical year in Mumbai with their seven-year-old daughter, Zeenat. While Murtuza teaches, Shari is planning to homeschool Zee, reconnect with her family, and research her great-great grandfather with hopes of creating a family history. But Sharifa’s cousins, with whom she was once close, are at odds. Fatema is involved in a campaign to ban the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) while Zainab sees it as a time-honored tradition that must be respected. Sharifa thinks it’s a cruel and harmful injustice, but isn’t at all sure it is still practiced in the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim sect they all belong to – and if it is, she wonders who is insisting on such an outdated practice? Today I talked to writer, activist, and psychotherapist Farzana Doctor, author of Seven (Dundurn Press, 2020). She was born in Zambia to Indian parents, lived there for five years and then in 1971, immigrated with her family to Canada. As a teenager, Doctor became interested in community organizing around issues of gender violence, gender rights, and environmental protection. She currently volunteers with WeSpeakOut, a global group that is working to ban female genital cutting in her Dawoodi Bohra community. Her first novel was Stealing Nasreen 2007, and her second, Six Metres of Pavement 2012, won a Lambda Literary Award and was short-listed for the 2012 Toronto Book Award. Her third novel, All Inclusive , was a Kobo 2015 and National Post Best Book of the Year. Named one of CBC Books’ “100 Writers in Canada You Need To Know Now,” she has also recently published a poetry collection. In her spare time, Farzana Doctor poses Maggie, her dog, with books she loves under the hashtag #MaggieWithBooks. And in previous times, she loved going to restaurants and travelling. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Gone Missing in Harlem Karla FC Holloway December 7, 2021 Gone Missing in Harlem by Karla FC Holloway (TriQuarterly 2021) tells the story of an African American family trying to survive the early decades of the twentieth century. The Mosbys leave their life in Sedalia within hours after six-year-old Percy loudly notes that his father’s boss has made a mistake in calculating what is owed. Percy’s parents know what would happen if they stayed. They settle in Harlem, but the Spanish flu is raging around the globe, and Percy’s father doesn’t survive. His mother, DeLilah, is pregnant with Selma. Years later, Percy witnesses a murder in New York, and DeLilah sends him back to Sedalia. She does her best to make a home for her daughter, but Selma’s childhood is cut short when a brutal rape leaves her pregnant. After her baby is kidnapped, the city’s first ‘colored policeman’, Weldon Haynie Thomas, vows that this kidnapping will not end like the Lindbergh kidnapping. Gone Missing in Harlem touches upon many things, including African American soldiers coming home from WWI, the Great Migration north, and the world of 1930’s Harlem. Gone Missing in Harlem is historical, African American literary fiction and a mystery, but it’s ultimately a novel about the lengths a mother will go to protect her family. Karla FC Holloway , Ph.D., M.L.S., is James B. Duke Professor Emerita of English and Professor of Law at Duke University. She is former Dean of Humanities and Social Science Faculty at Duke. Her research and teaching focused on African American cultural studies, bioethics, literature, and law. Her national and institutional board memberships have included the Greenwall Foundation’s Advisory Board in Bioethics, the Trent Center for Bioethics and Humanities, the North Carolina Humanities Council, the College Board, and the Hastings Center. She is a co-founder of Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies and founding co-director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. Professor Holloway is the recipient of national awards and foundation fellowships including the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency Fellowship and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship at Harvard University’s Du Bois Institute. Professor Holloway is the author of over fifty essays and ten books including Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics and the Color of Our Character (1995), Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (2002), BookMarks: Reading in Black and White (2006), and Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature (2014). In her emerita years she has shifted to fiction and has published A Death in Harlem (2019) and Gone Missing in Harlem (2021) both with Triquarterly. She’s at work on the final book in the “in Harlem” series, A Haunting in Harlem , and tweets on bioethics, law, society, and popular cultures from @ProfHolloway. When she’s not tweeting, or writing, she’s deep into reading fiction or painting miniature acrylic landscapes and abstract compositions. Anything, she says, with colors that swirl into cerulean. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Bone Broth Lyndsey Ellis February 1, 2022 Lyndsey Ellis’s debut novel, Bone Broth (Hidden Timber Books 2021) tells the story of Justine Holmes, who is mourning her husband’s death and grappling with both societal and family tensions. It’s 2015, and the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri are still simmering after the fatal police shooting sparked a national debate about use-of-force law, militarization of police, and the relationship between the police and African Americans. Justine’s adult children, an unemployed former activist who is angry at her mother, a realtor still mourning the loss of her only child, and a defeated politician who struggles with his sexual identity, are all mourning their own losses. Tension builds as Justine faces her activist past, her marriage to an abusive husband, and her unquenched longing for family peace, but the only thing that makes her feel alive is stealing small items from other people’s funerals. Lyndsey Ellis is a fiction writer, essayist, and novelist. Her work has appeared in Kweli Journal, Catapult, Fiction Writers Review, Electric Literature, Joyland, Entropy, Shondaland, and several anthologies. Ellis was a recipient of the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for her fiction. She’s currently a prose editor for great weather for MEDIA and The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose & Thought. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where she enjoys thrift stores, bike riding and horror films when she’s not reading or writing. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Nick Bones Underground Phil M. Cohen November 9, 2021 Shmulie Shimmer is the inventor of LERBS, the most popular designer drug ever to be created. Turns out that it leaves people brain dead, and Shmulie should be in prison, but his business partner took the rap. Now Shmulie’s father hasn’t heard from him in over a year and half. He approaches Shmulie’s high school friend, Professor Nick Friedman, aka Nick Bones, private detective. Nick’s beautiful daughter was a victim of Lerbs, and Nick never wants to see the guy again, but Shmulie’s father has cancer and only a few months to live, so NIck takes the case. It’s a future in which the world no longer works the way it did, and sharp-witted, colorful characters roam above and below ground in what is an unrecognizable New York City. Now, Nick needs the help of his AI computer to make his way in the Velvet Underground, previously known as part of the subway system. Phil M. Cohen's Nick Bones Underground (Koehler Books, 2019) is a mystery, a wild ride through the future, a science-fiction nightmare, and an exploration of religion and humanity. Phil M. Cohen is a rabbi who has been engaged in Jewish storytelling for a very long time. In addition to a B.A from Dickinson College and rabbinic ordination from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Phil holds a Ph.D. in Jewish thought from Brandeis University and an MFA from Spalding University in Louisville. From his rabbinic education, he learned how to create and interpret stories. From his doctoral experience, he learned how to grapple with philosophical questions. In earning an MFA, he learned how to write fiction. From his work as a rabbi, he gained deep insight into the Jewish and broader world. And from realms unknown and a bit scary, Rabbi Doctor Cohen discovered his creative imagination. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Indigo Field Marjorie Hudson October 24, 2023 Indigo Field by Marjorie Hudson (Regal House Publishing 2023) paints a sweeping picture of multigenerational family trauma, Native American and Black history, and the earth’s vengeance on human pettiness. A retired colonel is stunned when his wife dies, leaving him stranded in the fancy, rural North Carolina retirement community he’d hated from the start. The community is located next to an abandoned field that hides centuries of crimes. The only person who remembers is Reba, an elderly Black woman who speaks to the ghosts of her entire family. Reba takes in the white child whose evil father killed her beloved niece, whom she doesn’t want to disappoint. The colonel mistakenly causes damage to Reba’s old car and unleashes a torrent of spirits, while the colonel’s son guards bones that have been unearthed in what was once “Indian Field.” This is a stunning debut in which North Carolina race relations, land use and ancient trees, farming and development, history and memory are all uprooted during a massive storm. Marjorie Hudson was born in a small town in Illinois, raised in Washington, D.C., and now lives in rural North Carolina. Her new novel Indigo Field explores the untold stories of the people and history of the rural South, hidden under the surface of an abandoned field. Her story collection Accidental Birds of the Carolinas was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Novello Fiction Award. Her creative nonfiction book Searching for Virginia Dare explores the fate of the first English child born in America. Hudson’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in six anthologies, including Idol Talk: Women Writers on the Teenage Infatuations That Changed Their Lives , and What Doesn’t Kill You (stories) as well as in many magazines and journals, including Story , West Branch, Yankee , American Land Forum , and National Parks Magazine . She writes on topics ranging from pond fishing to Sufi dancing, from extraordinary dogs to English explorers, from Indigenous history to the life of the monarch butterfly. Her work has won support from the Hemingway Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook Retreat for Women Writers, and the North Carolina Arts Council, as well as earning the Blumenthal Award, a North Carolina Fiction Syndicate Award, and two Pushcart Special Mentions. A community-builder in Chatham County, NC, she has created two ambitious community reads, run a coffeehouse for artists and writers, been a mentor for at-risk children, served on the board of her local arts council, the board of the Black Historical Society, and the Board of the Haw River Assembly, serving as volunteer crew for an ambitious river festival. In addition, Hudson is known for educating her community about the life and work of enslaved poet George Moses Horton. She teaches creative writing through conferences, universities, and her own Kitchen Table Workshops, ongoing since 2009.Hudson lives on a family farm in Chatham County, North Carolina, with her husband, Sam, her small feisty terrier DJ Calhoun, and a community of wild birds. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Proof of Life Sheila Lowe June 28, 2022 Proof of Life (Write Choice Ink 2021) is the second book in author Sheila Lowe’s Beyond the Veil paranormal suspense series. In the first book (What she Saw 2013), a woman wakes up on a train with no idea about who she is or where she’s going. When the train stops, she gets off and starts walking, and someone recognizes her and gives her a ride home. She’s shocked to learn that she has two sets of identification, two completely different identities, neither of which seem familiar. Three hundred pages of character building, plot twists, extreme bravery, and scary science gone mad lead to startling revelations. The second book in the series, Proof of Life, is a gripping tale that centers on Jessica Mack, a character who hears the voices of dead people. It’s affecting her both mentally and physically and she needs to figure out how to handle it before she gets hurt. The story includes a disappointed FBI agent, a passing bicyclist with important information, a minister who understands the five “clairs ,” and a possible love interest. Jessica learns how to manage her new talent, and now she’s praying that the voices she hears can help her locate a missing child. One who is hopefully still alive. Sheila Lowe writes psychological suspense mysteries that place regular people into extraordinary circumstances. Like the fictional character Claudia Rose from her award-winning Forensic Handwriting series, Sheila is a real-life forensic handwriting expert who testifies in court cases and has written several widely sold books like Handwriting of the Famous and Infamous (2001). She’s also known for serious books such as Advanced Studies in Handwriting Psychology (2018) and Succeeding in the Business of Handwriting Analysis (2019). In her Beyond the Veil paranormal suspense series (What She Saw 2019, Proof of Life 2021), her character Claudia Rose shows up as a side character. Sheila writes that she began researching what happens after death when her daughter was killed by a boyfriend in 2000. She was comforted to learn that there was life after earth, and three different mediums told her that her daughter, Jennifer, would channel the book through her. When she isn’t writing, Sheila teaches handwriting analysis to students around the world, and she lives in Ventura, California. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Burnt House Lowell Mick White January 28, 2020 After her parents' divorce, Jackie Stalnaker is sent to her grandmother’s dilapidated house in a tiny town in West Virginia. It’s a hot, mid 1970’s summer in Burnt House, where the only thing to look forward to is a weekly old movie shown at the library. But Jackie is grateful to be away from her squabbling parents and delighted with the crazy characters she meets in Burnt House (Buffalo Times Press, 2018). In these charming short stories, White creates a world of complex characters, some lazy, cranky or perfectly satisfied, others lonely and lost, but all connected by history and their shared geography. Lowell Mick White is the author of six books and his work has been published in many literary journals, including Callaloo , Iron Horse Literary Review , and Short Story . A winner of the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, awarded by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters, White lived in Austin, Texas, for 25 years, at various times making his living working as a cab driver, a shade tree salesman, and an Internal Revenue Service bureaucrat. He is Editor of Alamo Bay Press and has been the National Endowment for the Arts Artist-in-Residence at the federal prison in Bryan, Texas. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, White is an Instructional Associate Professor at Texas A&M University, where he earned his PhD. When not reading or writing, White enjoys drinking beer, eating turkey legs, and taking long drives in the Texas countryside. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Lucky Boy Shanthi Sekaran January 14, 2019 An optimistic young Mexican woman gets pregnant while trying to cross the border into the states. An Indian-American woman struggles with infertility. When undocumented Solimar is detained by the state, Kavya and her husband foster and then fall in love with her little boy. They’re good people, the law is on their side, and it’s hard not to root for them, but we’re forced to ask ourselves - what defines parenthood? Is it the biological connection or is it the daily grind of feeding, changing diapers, and tending to all their needs? In addition to a mother’s love, Lucky Boy (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2017) deals with immigration, undocumented workers, the struggle between haves and the have-nots, infertility, survival, and love. Shanthi Sekaran is a writer and educator from Berkeley, California. Lucky Boy was named an IndieNext Great Read and an NPR Best Book of 2017. It won the Housatonic Book Award and was a finalist for Stanford University's Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her essays and stories have also appeared in The New York Times , Salon.com, and the LA Review of Books . Sekaran is a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, an AWP mentor, and she teaches writing at Mills College. She was born in Sacramento, is the daughter of immigrants from India, and has two older brothers, a husband, two young sons, and a cat. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Father Guards the Sheep Sari Rosenblatt March 30, 2021 In Sari Rosenblatt’s collection, Father Guards the Sheep (University of Iowa Press, 2020), by turns tender and hilarious, we see fathers who are bullies and nervous watchdogs, haunted by their own pasts and fear of the future they may never see. And who do their daughters become? A substitute teacher who encounters mouthy students who believe she’s not real. Another lands a job on her city’s arson squad, researching derelict properties their owners might want to burn. A beleaguered mother, humiliated by the PTA’s queen bee, finds solace in an ancient piece of caramel candy. “I keep sucking,” she says, “until some flavor, no longer caramel, comes out.” In the end, this is what all these finely wrought characters want: to wring sweetness from what’s been passed down to them. Rosenblatt’s comic sensibility, so present in these stories, entertains and consoles, while seeming to say to her readers: you might as well laugh. Sari Rosenblatt earned an MFA (1984) from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has won awards for her stories from Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry , Glimmer Train, New Millenium Writings, and Ms Magazine . She has been published in the Iowa Review and has taught fiction writing at several schools, most recently the Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven. Her first book of short stories, Father Guards the Sheep, was winner of the 2020 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Sari has also completed a novel, "Daughter of Retail", based on the first short story in Father Guards the Sheep . Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Watershed Mark Barr January 15, 2020 It’s 1937 and rural Tennessee is still recovering from the Great Depression. The construction of a huge dam brings job seekers, fortune hunters, and the promise of electricity to the area. Claire, a young mother of two, realizes her marriage is over when she wakes up with a sexually transmitted disease brought home by her husband. Nathan is an engineer with a shameful secret who changes his name to get work at the dam. Everyone in this colorful cast of dog-fighting neighbors, beer-guzzling ex-husbands, and power-hungry employers is trying to survive in the mosquito-infested heat of a southern summer. Mark Barr has been awarded fellowships from Blue Mountain Center, I-Park Artists Enclave, Jentel Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Millay Colony, and Yaddo. Favorably reviewed by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist, his debut novel, Watershed (Hub City, 2019), was featured in the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance’s fall Okra list and Deep South Magazine's Fall/Winter Reading List, and named as one of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's "12 Southern Books You'll Want to Read This Fall" and one of Nashville Lifestyles Magazine’s "Four Fall Reads." Mark holds undergraduate degrees from Hendrix College and University of Iowa, and an M.F.A. from Texas State University. He lives with his wife and sons in Arkansas, where he develops software and bakes bread. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books Network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Sunflowers Beneath the Snow Teri M. Brown February 15, 2022 Teri M. Brown's novel Sunflowers Beneath the Snow (Atmosphere Press 2022) opens in 1973 with a Ukrainian man being spirited out of the USSR. He’s part of the resistance and his cover was blown. Ivanna, his wife is told that he died in another woman’s bed, and she never wants to hear his name again. Loyal to the Soviet Union, Ivanna manages to raise her daughter Yevtsye, who grows up, falls in love, gets married, and gives birth to a daughter, Ionna. Then Gorbachev comes to power and the Soviet Union collapses, leaving Ivanna in shock but offering hope to Yevtsye, Danya, and their daughter. The years pass, and Ionna wants to learn languages and see the world. She takes a job at an American summer camp and slowly overcomes the prejudices of the rest of the staff. Then the Soviet army invades Crimea, and she can’t get home, so she heads to New York City in hopes of blending into the large Ukrainian population. This is a story of resilience and courage. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next