#22 - MG debut, Lisa Stringfellow talks Black History Month and School Visits

03/01/23 • 56 min

To mark Black History Month, I talk this week to Lisa Stringfellow, whose debut middle-grade fantasy novel, A Comb of Wishes, was published last February by HarperCollins/Quill Tree Books. The paperback came out this month, and it tells the story of a 12 year old Black girl as she deals with loss and longing.
A Comb of Wishes won Kweli Journal’s inaugural Color of Children’s Literature Manuscript Award in 2019, has received starred reviews, and just this week, Lisa learned that she is a finalist in the Superior Achievement in a Middle Grade Novel category of the Bram Stoker Awards 2022, voted on by members of the Horror Writers Association.

Lisa also teaches English at a middle school in Boston, and so this episode marks the first of three shows in which we will look at the art and science behind Author School visits – how to get them, how to do them brilliantly, and hopefully, how to make some money from them. Look out for episodes #24 and #25 for more on school visits.

To find out more about Lisa, visit her website, or follow her on Instagram or Twitter.
To buy Lisa's debut MG novel, A Comb of Wishes, please consider buying it from her favorite indie bookstore, Brookline Booksmith. Or, to support other indie bookstores across the country, as well as this podcast through an affiliate link, please buy it from Bookshop.org.

Laurel also mentioned

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#21 Ghostwriter L.A. Mitchell pulls back the curtain on publishing's best kept secret

Bestselling author L.A. Mitchell published her first story—a time travel short called THE LOST HIGHWAY—in 2008. Since then, she has published over 33 works of fiction and non-fiction as a ghostwriter. Her works include memoir, business non-fiction, self-help, young adult, women’s fiction, and—most prevalently—romance.
Spotlights have been turned recently on the craft of a ghostwriter following the publication of Prince Harry's autobiography, SPARE, by Penguin Random House. The prince readily acknowledges the involvement of "superstar ghostwriter", J.R. Moehringer, and yet many people have accused him of cheating because he didn't write the book himself. In this episode, experienced ghostwriter, L.A. Mitchell, pulls back the curtain on publishing's best kept secret, and shares her own processes for bringing someone else's voice to life.
To find out more about Laura, visit her website, where you can sign up to both of her regular newsletters, or follow her on Instagram.
Published in her own name, Laura's new novel, FARTHERMOST - as she mentioned in the interview - is available on Kindle Vella, the new serialized story platform from Amazon, and you can read the first three episodes of FARTHERMOST for FREE here.

FARTHERMOST: Five years past the End Times War, inside the bombed-out shell of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, seventeen-year-old Ronin Black discovers a portal to a secret realm where all of art’s masterpieces, from doodles to Degas, blend into a vast canvas of shared emotion. Together with a motley band of art misfits, this thief-turned-guardian discovers that the key to restoring humanity is closer than he imagined. New episodes on Thursdays and Sundays.

While me may never learn which books she has ghosted, she did mention how much she had enjoyed PACHINKO by Min Jin Lee, a National Book Award finalist. If you haven't yet read this amazing book, please consider buying it from from Bookshop.org - Laura's favorite bookstore in Denver, The Tattered Cover, will receive a small fee from any purchase using this link, which will go towards the costs of keeping the store running. Many thanks.

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#23 - Performance poet Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton marks International Women's Day

Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally-known writer, librettist, educator, activist and performer. She began as a slam poet, competing regularly in national poetry slams, and was even voted one of the top performance poets in the world. In 2017, she was the first African American to be appointed as Poet Laureate of Houston, In 2019 her poetry collection, Newsworthy, won huge acclaim, and her memoir, Black Chameleon, is out this week from Harold Holt. Deborah has also taken her poetry and artistry into other artforms – opera, ballet and most recently visual arts - using those new opportunities to lift up women and to celebrate their stories, whether those stories were well known or not.
International Women's Day is celebrated today, March 8th, 2023, and is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The first National Women's Day was celebrated in the US in 1909, and it became International Women's Day in 1911. To mark the centenary in 2011, March was declared as Women's History Month by US President Barack Obama.
Buy Deborah's new memoir, Black Chameleon: Memory, Womanhood, and Myth, from Kindred Stories, Brazos Bookstore, or the Bookshop.org.

Watch Deborah's Poet Laureate response to Hurricane Harvey on BBC World News in 2017.
Deborah's book recommendations were:
Chrome Valley, a poetry collection by Mahogany Brown
Interior Chinatown, a novel by Charles Yu
A little devil in America, by Hanif Abdurraqib

You can find Deborah at: