Meet Sibyls at Tahoe Literary Festival
Join Karen Nelson, Kim Culbertson and Julia Park Tracey at the Tahoe Literary Festival, a celebration of writing, art, and storytelling on October 10th from 4:30-5:30pm.
Books will be available to purchase at the event!
About The Sunken Town:
If you admit on truth, what else will you have to acknowledge?
Lindsay, a thirty-year-old California native, never gave much thought to being adopted. When she unexpectedly inherits her birth mother Claire’s farmhouse in Maine, she is plunged into a journey across the country and across the years into a lake of secrets that will ultimately reveal just how far everyone was willing to go to protect her. Told from both Lindsay’s and Claire’s points of view, The Sunken Town explores adoption, identity, the nature of family dynamics, mother-daughter relationships, the impact of family secrets, the weight of motherhood and the lasting consequences of the choices people make.
About Karen Nelson:
Karen Nelson is a writer and the co-founder of the nonprofit Writing by Writers. During her long career in nonprofits, she has protected open space, funded cancer research, trained people to complete endurance events, and helped writers bring their work into the world. When not organizing writing workshops, she can be found hiking with her dog, reading traveling, experimenting in the kitchen, and hosting dinner parties.
About Other People’s Kids:
Sometimes, life doesn’t follow a lesson plan…
After being attacked by a disgruntled parent in the parking lot of the private San Francisco Bay Area high school where she has taught English for the past twelve years, traumatized Chelsea Garden flees to her hometown of Imperial Flats in the Northern California foothills. When Chelsea meets beleaguered principal of Imperial Flats High School, Nora Delgado, the two realize they might have found each other at an essential crossroads. To complicate matters, her former classmate and messy first love, Evan Dawkins, has also recently joined the faculty at IFHS to teach music. And he wasn’t expecting Chelsea to walk back into his life. Other People’s Kids follows three educators: one at the beginning of his career, one in the middle of hers, and one on her way out. A story about teaching, hometowns, and risking change in midlife.
About Kim Culbertson:
Kim Culbertson is the award-winning author of five YA novels with Sourcebooks and Scholastic as well as the author of the Heinemann teaching guide 100-Word Stories: A Short Form for Expansive Writing. Other People’s Kids is her first novel for adults. She lives in Northern California where she has been teaching high school since 1997.
About Whoa, Nelly! A Love Story (*with Footnotes):
She went looking for Laura. She found herself.
Lonely librarian Nelly sets out to walk in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s footsteps—only to find that the prairie isn’t as romantic as she imagined. As she confronts the darker legacies of the Little House series—racism, revisionist nostalgia, and the shadowy influence of Rose Wilder Lane—Nelly must reckon with her own buried truths.
Along the way, there’s a clever, slow-burn romance with a modern-day Almanzo, a rivalry with a would-be Laura, and a blizzard that will test everything Nelly thought she knew about courage and care. By the time she boards the train home, Nelly has rescued more than just a child in danger—she’s reclaimed her own story.
Whoa, Nelly! A Love Story (with Footnotes) is a sharp, soulful heroine’s journey for the literary misfits, the daughters of difficult mothers, and anyone who ever found solace in a well-worn paperback.
About Julia Park Tracey:
Julia Park Tracey is an award-winning journalist and author of nine books, with an emphasis on women’s history and her female ancestors’ stories. Inspired by a mysterious train receipt in her family’s scrapbook, she researched her Orphan Train roots and continues to write novels about her found relatives. A lifelong fan of the Little House books, Tracey put her train-traveling time when crossing the American prairie to good use when she toured for her previous novels.
