Anesa Miller and Lora Chilton to Appear at Kentucky Book Festival
Anesa Miller, author of I Never Do This, and Lora Chilton, author of 1666: A Novel will be in attendance at the Kentucky Book Festival this fall on November 2nd! The Kentucky Book Festival runs from 9:30am-5:00pm.
EVENT ADDRESS:
161 Lexington Green Circle
Lexington, KY 40502
For more information, visit the Kentucky Book Festival’s page: https://kybookfestival.org/
Buy your copy of I Never Do This here.
Buy your copy of 1666: A Novel here.
About I Never Do This:
LaDene Faye Howell has spent her life in the small town of Devola, on an oxbow of the Muskingum River, in southeast Ohio. Her family is conservative and deeply religious, although another branch of the Howell clan are notorious criminals. When one of her outlaw relatives returns from prison, LaDene hopes the two of them may share an evening of fun, or even a spark of romance. Instead, Bobby Frank embroils her in kidnapping their old high school principal.
Taken into custody, LaDene recounts her misadventures in the form of a dramatic monologue. Pledging to “tell all in full truth so help me God,” she hopes to keep herself out of jail and perhaps even soften Bobby’s likely sentence. She aims to capture her listeners’ sympathy by recounting a history she has never shared before: her teenage pregnancy and confinement at an unforgiving evangelical facility for wayward girls.
The heart of the story is LaDene’s struggle to live as her own person while remaining true to her heritage and family loyalties. With country noir flair, it touches on spiritual abuse, addiction, family entanglements, and the disenfranchisement of women and young people in fundamentalist settings.
About Anesa Miller:
Anesa Miller is a native of Wichita, Kansas, a graduate of the University of Idaho, a long-term resident of Ohio, and recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship for creative writing. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared widely, and her previous novel, Our Orbit, was a finalist in regional fiction in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.
About 1666: A Novel:
The survival story of the Patawomeck Tribe of Virginia has been remembered within the tribe for generations, but the massacre of Patawomeck men and the enslavement of women and children by land hungry colonists in 1666 has been mostly unknown outside of the tribe until now. Author Lora Chilton, a member of the tribe through the lineage of her father, has created this powerful fictional retelling.
Told in first person point of view through the imagined lives of two women, Chilton tells the harrowing stories of Ah’SaWei WaTaPaAnTam (Golden Fawn) and NePa’WeXo (Shining Moon), members of the surviving Patawomeck tribe, who after the slaughter of their men were sold and transported to Barbados via slave ship. Separated and bought by different sugar plantations, they endured, each plotting their escapes before finally making their way back to Virginia to be reunited with the few members of the tribe that remained. It is because of these women that the tribe is in existence to this day.
About Lora Chilton:
A member of the Patawomeck Indian Tribe of Virginia, Lora Chilton tells the story of her people and their unlikely survival due to the courage of three Patawomeck women. As a part of the process, she interviewed tribal elders, researched colonial documents and studied the Patawomeck language. Chilton graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Nursing. She has worked as a Registered Nurse, a small business owner, an elected official, a non-profit executive and a writer. Memphis is her home. 1666: A Novel is her second work of historical fiction.
