Novel Manuscripts
FLAPPERS AND FUGITIVES
Under consideration by a university press
In FLAPPERS AND FUGITIVES, Hattie Brook, a 15-year-old, working class, white girl living in Jazz Age San Francisco, learns from an 18-year-old detective she meets in a speakeasy that her ostensibly dead father is the Old West outlaw known as the Sundance Kid. Hattie confronts her mother, Etta, who reluctantly reveals a sliver of her past with Sundance, as well as the fact that he’s living in Austin, Texas.
Unbeknownst to Etta, Hattie and her wealthy Black best friend—and latent crush—Ruby McCoy take off by train for Jim Crow Texas in search of Sundance. With the amateur detective on their trail from San Francisco to LA and across the desert to Austin and a freedom town called Clarksville, Hattie and Ruby overcome multiple obstacles related to race, class, and sex.
Finding her father doesn’t make Hattie’s family “whole” in the way she had hoped. Instead, surrounded by half a dozen people who love her, she realizes she’s free to define her family her own way.
OUR LADY OF THE MILK
Work in progress
Killer Nashville Judges’ Top Pick for 2025 Claymore Awards (Southern Gothic category)
In 1967 Washington, DC, Noreen “Nora” Sullivan, a nineteen-year-old student at Catholic University, becomes pregnant by her priest, with whom she had a fling. Nora moves into Our Lady of the Milk–Home for Unwed Mothers. One of the nuns in charge, Sister Rosalie, grows obsessed with Nora’s unborn baby when she learns who the father is. Meanwhile the ghost of a nineteenth-century resident who regrets giving her baby away, Grace Collins, haunts current residents to persuade them to keep their babies.
Will Grace convince Nora to keep her baby? Will the Church let Nora keep her baby if she wants to? Will Nora be able to protect the baby from Rosalie?