2026 Six Bridges Book Festival: Session registration now open!

Razan Abdin is a Palestinian writer who grew up in Arkansas while spending many summers in her ancestral homeland. She has been scribbling stories since elementary school. When Abdin isn’t busy arranging words on a page, she’s probably traveling, filling her life with art, or daydreaming about a world where everyone has what they need to thrive. She lives in Little Rock with her wild, wonderful poodle, Margot. Splendidly Sawsan is her debut book.

Splendidly Sawsan is a story of affirming others and learning to love yourself. This picture books follows Sawsan, a vivacious neurodivergent child who sees the world a little differently—and maybe that’s a pretty splendid thing.

Sponsored by CALS Youth Programming

Tolani Akinola is a Reese’s Book Club LitUp Fellow. She holds a BA from the University of Chicago and an MPH from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. She lives outside of Atlanta.

In the novel Leave Your Mess at Home, when the four Longe siblings find themselves together again at their Nigerian immigrant parents’ Thanksgiving table, a decade’s worth of secrets and a lifetime of resentments explode to the fore. Big-hearted, hilarious, and poignant, Leave Your Mess at Home is an insightful debut about forgiveness, unconditional love, and becoming who you want to be, asking the question: what do we owe to our families, and what do we owe to ourselves?

Photo by Reginald Eldridge Jr.

Dr. Allison Alford is a communication expert, author, and speaker whose work centers on the often invisible roles women play in their families and communities—especially the overlooked labor performed by adult daughters. With a PhD in communication studies and two decades of university-level teaching, Alford brings both academic depth and heartfelt clarity to conversations about gender, identity, and relational responsibility.

Good Daughtering: The Work You’ve Always Done, the Credit You’ve Never Gotten, and How to Finally Feel Like Enough invites readers to name and reframe the emotional, logistical, and cognitive labor daughters provide—labor that is deeply impactful yet rarely acknowledged.

Uchenna Awoke lives and writes in Nsukka, Nigeria. His short stories have appeared in Transition, Elsewhere Lit, Trestle Ties, Oyster River Pages, the Evergreen Review, and others. He received fellowships from MacDowell and the Vermont Studio Center in 2017 and 2019, respectively. He was also a 2019 Graywolf Africa Prize finalist. He is an Artist Protection Fund Fellow and the inaugural Arkansas International Writer-at-Risk Residency Fellow, currently living in Fayetteville. The Liquid Eye of a Moon was his debut novel.

A Siege of the Owls is an urgent and unforgettable work of magical realism following a young man coming of age in rural West Africa as he bears witness to the violence, upheaval, and hope in a rapidly changing society.

Lee Bains is a poet and musician from Birmingham, Alabama. A cult songwriter forged in independent scenes, he has performed all over the U.S. and Europe, receiving acclaim from Rolling Stone, the New York Times, NPR, and the Guardian. After first having his poems published by the New Yorker in 2021, Bains will see his debut poetry collection, Work Lunch, published by Hub City Press on October 13, 2026. Bains has lent his work to support striking coal miners, immigrants’ rights groups, abortion funds, and anti-racism organizations. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he works between tours as a handyman.

In Work Lunch, Bains’s poems explore the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of Southern culture and values through the lens of food, whether at a meat-and-three or a taquería. Within these sprawling, long-form poems, a take-out gyro prompts a reflection on religious-nationalist violence, a Cuban sandwich spurs consideration of U.S. imperialism, a hamburger channels into a cry of solidarity with organized labor, and a salad elicits an epic rumination on lineage, class, race, gender, memory, and faith. These poems glimpse sandwiches under shade trees, tables full of boisterous coworkers discussing barbecue, and reflective moments at those dwindling local spots, all fertile ground for investigating Bains’s home places, the systems of power that shape life there, and the ways in which ordinary people survive, connect, and fight back.

Photo by Matt White.

Judy Batalion is the author of several award-winning works of nonfiction, most recently the New York Times bestselling history The Light of Days, which won a National Jewish Book Award. Batalion’s work has been translated into 24 languages, was optioned by Warner Bros. and Amblin Partners, and has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vogue, the Forward, Salon, and others. The Last Woman of Warsaw is her first novel.

Set in the dazzling and sophisticated pre-war capital of Poland, The Last Woman of Warsaw follows two very different young Jewish women—Fanny, a feisty fashion photographer, and Zosia, a political activist. The women are unexpectedly thrown together on a rescue mission and develop an unlikely and powerful friendship as they search for love, freedom, and a sense of home.

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

Join Governor Andy Beshear for a hopeful conversation about reclaiming faith as a force for good instead of harm and healing a divided nation through our shared values. Centered around his new book, Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country, Governor Beshear will share stories of healing, justice, forgiveness, welcoming, and moral clarity.

In Go and Do Likewise, Governor Beshear shares what his own faith has meant to him, how it has informed his family and his public life—and serves as a rebuke to how faith has been hijacked, profaned, misused, and corrupted by Donald Trump and other public figures. By regrounding faith in compassion and kindness, Beshear believes we can start to heal as a country.

Whether you support organized religion or simply believe in the golden rule, this evening is a powerful reminder of the values that can truly unite us.

Governor Andy Beshear is a born-and-raised Kentuckian. Before he was elected Governor in 2019, Andy served as the state’s Attorney General since 2015, working as a lawyer on behalf of the government for the people of Kentucky. Andy and his wife, Britainy, have two children, Will and Lila, and dog Winnie. His family attends Beargrass Christian Church, where both Andy and Britainy serve as deacons. He is a graduate of Vanderbilt with a bachelor’s in political science and anthropology and holds a Juris Doctorate from the University of Virginia law school.

Ellie Black is a visiting assistant professor in English–Creative Writing at Hendrix College. She received a PhD in creative writing (emphasis in memoir/autotheory) and an MFA in poetry, both from the University of Mississippi. She was a finalist for the 2025 Disquiet Prize in Poetry, and her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Bennington Review, Sixth Finch, the Common, Washington Square Review, the Drift, and others.

Ellie Black’s debut collection, Revelator, winner of the 2026 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, glitches and falters; it imitates, iterates, and alludes. This obsessive, self-conscious book is concerned deeply with what’s real, what’s fake, and what’s fantasy, offering up a mirror to the ways we invent and perform ourselves on stages, on screens, and in our lives.

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of nine books of (mostly) fiction, most recently a collection of one hundred very short ghost stories called The Ghost Variations. He has participated in the Six Bridges Book Festival each year since its inception. His work has been translated into eighteen languages, and he divides his time between Little Rock, where he was raised, and Iowa City, where he is a professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Brockmeier will read a short excerpt from a work in progress.

Sponsored by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Jennifer Case is the author of Sawbill: A Search for Place, and her essays have appeared in journals such as the Rumpus, Orion, Ecotone, and North American Review. She teaches at the University of Central Arkansas and serves as an assistant nonfiction editor at Terrain.org.

Part memoir and part cultural reflection, The Carework Project: Reckoning with Love, Labor, and the Living World combines intimate storytelling with research, interviews, and visual art to explore what care means in a time of climate crisis. Case shows how caregiving, often invisible, gendered, or undervalued, is central to our survival, and how healing can start with the smallest gestures of attention. The book invites readers to envision a world where care is not a burden but a source of mutual renewal and belonging.

Acie Clark is a multi-genre writer from Florida and Georgia. A former writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he teaches in the Film, Theatre, and Creative Writing Department at the University of Central Arkansas and at Interlochen Center for the Arts. His debut poetry collection, Small Talk, was selected by Derrick Austin for the Hub City Press New Southern Voices Poetry Prize and will be published in 2026.

Acie Clark wants to talk. In the poetry collection Small Talk, Clark reconsiders our relationship to talking about work and the weather. Through lenses of recovery, birding, caregiving, gospel, and semantics, this collection shows its belief in multiplicities, in the seemingly contradictory identities that make us who we are, and in the hope talking to each other might still save us.

Photo by Emily Schiffer.

Quinn Connor is one pen in two hands: Robyn Barrow and Alex Cronin. Both writers from a young age, Barrow and Cronin met at Rhodes College in Memphis and together developed their unique co-writing voice. They are thankful that no matter what, there’s always another person in the world who cares about their characters as much as they do. An Arkansan and a Texan, when they aren’t writing, they’re arguing about the differences between queso and cheese dip. Barrow is an art historian of the medieval Nordic world and a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. Cronin is a Texan living under a Brooklyn zip code, working in PR to fund her writing habit. Whether Barrow is wandering the Far North or Cronin is chasing down homemade pasta in Prospect Heights, they write all the time. It’s their preferred form of conversation.

Fascination turns to obsession in Your Beloved Remains as two women drag each other into an academic horror of forgery, murder, and rage. Archivist Celia Kiel resides on the remote campus of fictional Basin College in Arkansas and commits herself to maintaining the legacy of Basin’s founder, 19th-century writer Beatrice Donahue. While the college faces closure, Celia will have to join forces with her professional rival Joan Harriot in order to forge the completion of Beatrice’s found final manuscript. As their world closes in and the ghosts of the Victorian past encroach, their creative collaboration spirals into an obsession more twisted than even their beloved Beatrice could have penned.

Sponsored by Arkansas Times

S. A. Cosby is a New York Times bestselling writer from southeastern Virginia. He is the author of All the Sinners Bleed, which was on more than forty Best of the Year lists, including Barack Obama’s, as well as an Edgar Award finalist for Razorblade Tears and Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner for Blacktop Wasteland. He has also won the Anthony Award, ITW Thriller Award, Barry Award, Macavity Award, BCALA Award, and Audie Award and has been longlisted for the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence.

In King of Ashes, when eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his brother Dante in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister Neveah exhausted from holding the family—and the family business—together. Neveah and their father, who run a crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident and that Dante’s recklessness has placed them all in real danger. Roman, a financial whiz with a head for numbers and a talent for making his clients rich, has some money to help buy his brother out of trouble. But as his bargaining chips go up in smoke, Roman realizes that he has only one thing left to offer to save his brother: his own particular set of skills. Roman begins his work for the criminals while Neveah tries to uncover the long-ago mystery of their mother’s disappearance when they were teenagers. But Roman is far less of a pushover than the gangsters realize. He is willing to do anything to save his family. Anything. Because everything burns.

Sponsored by the CALS Used Book Sale

Hope Coulter’s work includes poetry collection The Wheel of Light and two novels. Among her honors are Meringoff Awards in nonfiction and poetry and the Porter Prize. A Louisiana native, Coulter earned her AB at Harvard and her MFA at Queens University of Charlotte. She taught at Hendrix College for 32 years before retiring in 2025. She lives in Little Rock.

Coulter’s new story collection Rumors of Peace lifts up questions of agency and growth in the fractured American South. Centering the stories we spin to sustain our versions of self, it is about generational myth-building and how people, girls and women in particular, inhabit narratives in the process of authoring their lives.

Bestselling novelist Eli Cranor lives on the banks of Lake Dardanelle and teaches creative writing at Arkansas Tech University. His work has been included on “best of the year” lists from the New York Times, USA Today, Amazon Editors, and others. His work has been nominated for nearly every major award in the crime fiction genre, and most recently the prestigious Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and the Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing in Fiction.

For the first time, Edgar Award–winning author Eli Cranor’s acclaimed Arkansas Democrat-Gazette column “Where I’m Writing From” is collected in one volume. This collection is more than a peek behind the curtain of a bestselling author’s process; it’s a love letter to Arkansas and a testament to the power of showing up. Where I’m Writing From offers a front-row seat to the messy, beautiful reality of a life lived in pursuit of finding the perfect word.

Sarah Damoff is the author of The Bright Years, which was a USA Today bestseller and is being translated into 12 languages. She lives with her husband and children in Texas, where she has been a social worker.

A family saga suffused with humor, longing, and heartbreak, The Burning Side is about what we inherit and what we choose, about forgiveness and the ache of being known. It is, above all, about the meaning of home and the costs of long love.

Photo by Kaylynn Krieg.

Sponsored by Little Rock Public Radio

Award-winning writer Charlotte Druckman is the author of Skirt Steak and creator of the collection Women on Food. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and New York Magazine, among others. She lives in New York, where she was born and raised.

Part cultural analysis, part backstage tour, Love in the Afternoon, and Evening is a love letter to the misunderstood, often-dismissed American genre of soap operas. Critics, friends, and soap opera obsessives Charlotte Druckman and Mayukh Sen invite readers into a conversation that ranges from topics both serious (race, reproductive rights, queerness) and fun (fashion! long-lost daughters! evil twins!). It will make you want to bust out your shoulder pads and binge your favorite show all over again.

Photo by Melanie Dunea.

Sponsored by CALS Adult Programming

Karen Dukess is the USA Today bestselling author of The Last Book Party and contributed to the anthology Ladies in Waiting: Jane Austen’s Unsung Characters. She is also the host of the Castle Hill Author Talks, a podcast of Truro Center for the Arts on Cape Cod. She lives near New York City with her family.

Welcome to Murder Week is a novel about an American woman who travels to the English countryside after discovering tickets her late mother had purchased for a murder mystery simulation in a small British town. She teams up with two other solo travelers, both ardent mystery lovers, to solve the “crime” and also unravels shocking truths about her mother’s life, falling into a romance with a handsome local gin distiller along the way.

Sponsored by the CALS Foundation

Kathleen DuVal is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Native Nations: A Millennium in North America. A history professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, DuVal is a Guggenheim Fellow and has written for the Atlantic, Time, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. She appeared in the recent Ken Burns film The American Revolution. She grew up in Fayetteville.

Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as Native Nations: A Millennium in North America vividly recounts, the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples have remained—and will continue far into the future.

Sponsored in Memory of Buddy Villines

Ben Fountain’s work has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction, and a Whiting Writers Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He lives in North Carolina.

In the novel Rasputin Swims the Potomac, reporter Clarence Thomas Jr. is looking for a great story, former country music teen star Faith Spack has parlayed her fame into a job at the White House, and the two-term incumbent president is campaigning for a constitutionally dubious third term. After an outbreak at a campaign rally, a mysterious new pandemic of “weeping sickness” sweeps the nation, threatening the president’s hold on the Oval Office. Desperate to retain power, he enlists the mystical pro wrestler Rasputin to help ensure his reelection and guarantee additional seasons of his presidential reality TV show, The Real West Wing. But as Rasputin’s appeal threatens to exceed the president’s, and the wrestler’s supposedly supernatural powers start to seem like the real thing, the campaign finds itself trapped in a spandex-clad destiny no number of executive orders can control, one in which both Clarence and Faith are compelled to play increasingly large parts. Hilarious, compelling, and tragically relevant, Rasputin Swims the Potomac is both an escape and a warning, a scathing satire that explores the twists and turns of American democracy as it hurtles toward authoritarianism.

Beverly Gage is the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History at Yale. Her book G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography, the Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize, and the Ellis W. Hawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians.

This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip through U.S. History offers an on-the-road, behind-the-steering-wheel retelling of 250 years of U.S. history, starting at Philadelphia’s Revolution-era historic sites and ending at Disneyland in the 20th-century California dream. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it makes the case for exploring—and reckoning with—all 250 years of American national history. It also has some fun along the way.

Sponsored in Memory of Buddy Villines

Mary Lisa Gavenas, author of Color Stories: Behind the Scenes of America’s Billion-Dollar Beauty Industry, was named a Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography and has been cited as an expert commentator on the beauty business and female entrepreneurship (CBS, NBC, CNN, BBC-4). A former senior editor at Glamour, InStyle, and Mirabella, and columnist for Elle, she has contributed to the New York Times Magazine, Fast Company, and other national outlets.

As the only woman in Forbes’ Greatest Business Stories of All Time and the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange, Mary Kay Ash has a life story that reads like a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel. Based on fifteen years of research, Selling Opportunity: The Story of Mary Kay gives us a page-turning rags-to-riches story set against the backdrop of direct selling in all its overstated, over-the-top glory. Here, for the first time, is the definitive history of a peculiarly American industry and a mid-century mindset that ennobled extreme self-reliance, sticking to your guns, and blind faith in the American dream.

Alex George, known online as Lily P Crumbs, is a recipe developer, baker, and content creator. After being diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma at 22, she rediscovered baking during treatment as both a creative outlet and a source of stability. Her science-minded but playful approach, seen in everything from her viral cookie-ranking spreadsheet to Pop-Tart pop-ups and signature dessert riffs, has earned her a devoted following. Born in Philadelphia, she grew up in New Jersey and now lives in Philadelphia.

In her debut cookbook In the Mood to Bake, Alex George, the baking content creator and recipe developer behind the beloved online baking community Lily P Crumbs, shares recipes and ideas drawing on nostalgia, imagination, and the simple joy of making something delicious, showing what happens when curiosity, science, nostalgia, and a whole lot of resilience meet in the kitchen.

Sponsored by PLATED: The Arkansas Dining Guide

Ayana Gray is a New York Times bestselling author of speculative fiction. Her critically acclaimed works have been translated into more than a dozen languages across five continents. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, she now lives and writes in Arkansas.

In Hawk and Sparrow, Vesper Evans has always resented Basalton’s high society and the sorcery that provides them with a luxurious life unimaginable to most. Orphaned as a child and rescued by the editor of the Basalton Globe, Vesper is now an ambitious reporter determined to keep her newspaper afloat. While covering a society gala, Vesper happens upon the murdered body of a man she had spoken with just minutes before. The prime suspect is wealthy industrialist Maximilian Kite, who soon makes Vesper a tempting offer: Find the culprit and restore his reputation in exchange for a substantial fee. There’s only one catch: In order for her to infiltrate society, the two must pose as a courting couple. As they unearth the city’s secrets and scandals, Vesper finds herself in grave danger—while falling for one of the most infuriating, arrogant, handsome men she has ever met…

Sponsored by the Dr. Elizabeth Fletcher Dishongh Charitable Trust

Jess H. Gutierrez is a speaker and former journalist whose work has been published in the Northwest Arkansas Times, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Siloam Springs Herald Leader, and Fayetteville Free Weekly and who has earned awards from the Arkansas Press Association. She lives in Northwest Arkansas with her firefighter wife who is way cooler than she is, their three wild kids, a surly bulldog named Hank, and some kittens, rabbits, and chickens.

Adulting for Amateurs is a rowdy and hilarious collection of essays on life as an elder Millennial, filled with life lessons on everything from marriage to parenting to rolling with the punches when Gen Z mocks your TikTok dances.

Benjamin Hale is the author of the novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore and the short-fiction collection The Fat Artist. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, the Paris Review, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Conjunctions, and has been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing. He teaches at Bard College and lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

The true-crime story recounted in Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning begins in 2001 on Cave Mountain in the Arkansas Ozarks. Six-year-old Haley—the author’s cousin—gets lost on a mountain trail, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state’s history. Her disappearance—and her account, after she was found, of the “imaginary friend” she met in the woods—eventually becomes connected to another story that took place in the same wilderness more than twenty years earlier: a dark and bizarre story of a cult, brainwashing, murder, and the apocalyptic visions of a teenage prophet.

Sponsored by the John David Coulter Memorial Fund

Jordan Harper is the author of Everybody Knows, the Edgar-Award winning She Rides Shotgun, and Love and Other Wounds. Born and educated in Missouri, he now lives in Los Angeles, where he works as a writer and producer for television.

A Violent Masterpiece tells the story of Los Angeles power brokers and those at the edge—and a single shattering incident that threatens to bring it all crashing down. LA is ready to explode: A Hollywood pedophile is arrested and is ready to tear down the city to get his freedom. A young woman goes missing—and men in black rubber gloves who look like cops clean out her apartment in the middle of the night. And the serial killer known as the LA Ripper is on the loose, leaving tragic/graphic/brutal crime scenes in his wake. Three people who are trying to keep their heads above the dirty water will find themselves coming together to unite these strands into one enormous, unspeakable crime.

Sponsored by the CALS Used Book Sale

Nathan Harris is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Sweetness of Water, which was an Oprah’s Book Club pick, the winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. He holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas and lives in Chicago.

Amity is a gripping story about a brother and sister, emancipated from slavery but still searching for true freedom, and their odyssey across the deserts of Mexico to finally reunite, all while escaping a former master still intent on their bondage.

Sponsored by the Oxford American

Alix E. Harrow is the New York Times bestselling author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, Starling House, and an upcoming collection of short fiction. Her work has won a Hugo and a British Fantasy Award, and been shortlisted for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus, Southern Book Prize, and Goodreads Choice awards. From Kentucky, she now lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with her husband and their two semi-feral kids.

In The Everlasting, Sir Una Everlasting was Dominion’s greatest hero: the orphaned girl who became a knight, who died for queen and country. Her legend lives on in songs and stories, in children’s books and recruiting posters—but her life as it truly happened has been forgotten. Centuries later, Owen Mallory—failed soldier, struggling scholar—falls in love with her story, which takes him to war, to the archives—and then into the past itself. Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs. If they want to tell a different story, they’ll have to rewrite history itself.

Sponsored by the Dr. Elizabeth Fletcher Dishongh Charitable Trust

Annie Hartnett is the award-winning author of three novels: Rabbit Cake, Unlikely Animals, and the national bestseller The Road to Tender Hearts, which won the 2025 New England Book Award for fiction; is longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award; was named a best book of 2025 from NPR, LitHub, and Southern Living; and has been translated into over a dozen languages. Along with the writer Tessa Fontaine, Hartnett co-runs Accountability Workshops, helping writers commit to routines and embrace the long, slow, joyful, terrible process of doing the work. She lives in Massachusetts with her pretty good husband, perfect daughter, and two flawless rescue dogs, Willie Nelson and Minnie Mouse.

The Road to Tender Hearts is a darkly comic and warm-hearted novel about an old man on a cross-country mission to reunite with his high school crush—bringing together his adult daughter, two orphaned kids, and a cat that can predict death.

Sponsored by ESSE Purse Museum & Store

David George Haskell is a writer and biologist acclaimed for his lyrical explorations of the living world. Haskell is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, and his other literary awards include an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, a Guggenheim Fellow, and an adjunct professor of environmental sciences at Emory University.

Described as “a work of real passion” by the New York Times and a “seamless melding of poetry and science” by the Wall Street Journal, How Flowers Made Our World explores and celebrates the creative powers of flowers. It combines lyrical writing, sensual exploration, and the latest in scientific research to explore some of the most consequential life forms ever to have evolved, showing how our planet came to be and how it thrives today.

Sponsored by The Rebsamen Fund

Molly Irani is the cofounder and chief culture officer of the James Beard Award–winning Chai Pani Restaurant Group in Asheville, North Carolina. She is responsible for the business’s groundbreaking culture, management style, community engagement, and “mindblasting” hospitality. She lives in Asheville with her husband and business partner, Meherwan Irani, where they raised their daughter, Aria, and her siblings (a.k.a. two goldendoodles).

In Service Ready, Irani takes readers on an inspiring journey to the heights of culinary and professional success. While she and her husband learned their way into running a restaurant, Irani created a groundbreaking work culture with industry-leading retention rates. They have fostered a loyal team and legions of fans, and have since launched multiple Chai Pani locations, the fast-growing spin-off Botiwalla, and the popular spice business Spicewalla.

Sponsored by Bank of America

Chris Jennings is the author of Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism. A former editorial staffer at the New Yorker, he grew up in New York City and graduated from Deep Springs College and Wesleyan University. Jennings lives in northern California with his family.

In End of Days, Chris Jennings explains the significance of the historic Ruby Ridge siege by setting the story of the Weaver family within the long history of apocalyptic Christianity in the United States. The strain of doomsday Christianity that gripped the Weavers, he shows, was grounded in a particular reading of biblical prophecy that can be traced back to the 1870s and up through the twentieth-century rise of Christian fundamentalism to the right-wing conspiracism that now affects American society and politics. The events at Ruby Ridge acted as an accelerant for this spreading worldview and understanding them is essential to quelling the crisis that our nation confronts today.

Sponsored by the CALS Distinguished Lecture Fund in honor of Maurice Smith

Christina Lauren is the combined pen name of longtime writing partners and best friends Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings. The #1 international bestselling coauthor duo has produced 20 New York Times bestselling novels and has been published in over 30 languages. They are the authors of Love and Other Words, The Unhoneymooners, Autoboyography, The True Love Experiment, The Paradise Problem, and Tangled Up In You.

In The Romance Revival, one fateful accident erases a troubled marriage from memory—and love gets one extraordinary do-over. Three years ago, Emery Finch did something completely out of character: she got married. To Luca—the impossibly charming landscaper she met on one blistering night in Vegas who made her laugh, made her dance, made her feel. But now, Emery is consumed by her top-secret job, missing dinners, forgetting anniversaries, and promising herself Luca will understand once her cutting-edge research comes to light. When a tragic accident takes Luca from her, Emery breaks every rule to bring him back. And Luca would probably thank her for it, if only he could remember her. It may be a miracle of science, but for Emery it’s her one shot at a second chance.

Photo by Chandra Wicke.

Daria Lavelle is a speculative-fiction writer whose work has appeared in such outlets as LitHub, People.com, the Deadlands, and the Dread Machine. Born in Ukraine and raised in the New York metro area, she holds degrees in writing from Princeton University and Sarah Lawrence College, and loves opera, sandwiches, and the game One Night Ultimate Werewolf.

Lavelle’s debut novel, Aftertaste, was published in English in May 2025, and is being developed for film. When Konstantin Duhovny cooks a dish tied to a memory of someone deceased, he can summon their ghost back for one final meal. But what begins as a thrilling gift quickly spins out of control when he decides to open a restaurant that promises to reunite the Living and the Dead. As the boundaries between worlds start to blur, and as he falls in love with a woman with her own secret relationship with the afterlife, he must confront the limits of what can be reclaimed, and what we must let go, in order to move on. Deliciously unique and deeply emotional, Aftertaste is an epic love story and a genre-blending adventure through eating, grieving, and the moments that make us feel alive.

Ariel Lawhon is an award-winning, bestselling author of historical fiction. Her books have been translated into numerous languages and have been Good Morning America Book Club, Library Reads, One Book One County, Indie Next, Costco, Amazon Spotlight, and Book of the Month Club selections. She lives in the rolling hills outside Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband and four sons, and she splits her time between the grocery store and the baseball field.

The Pirate Queen is a sweeping historical adventure inspired by the life of Grace O’Malley, the legendary Irish folk heroine. A swashbuckling coming-of-age saga set in sixteenth-century Ireland, it follows O’Malley from her childhood through marriage, motherhood, and her complicated navigation of her role as a leader and fighter.

Paige Lewis is the author of the poetry collection Space Struck and the novel Canon. They teach at the University of Iowa and coedited Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance along with Kaveh Akbar.

In Canon, two unlikely heroes embark on quests to win God’s favor in this outrageously entertaining, profoundly heartfelt novel. Yara can’t comprehend why God has chosen them to slay Dominic, the ruthless leader of the army of Bad Guys. Cast out by their family and reeling from a destructive relationship, Yara reluctantly embarks on a perilous odyssey designed to prepare them for the daunting mission ahead. Meanwhile, Adrena, a disillusioned prophet with a terrifying secret power, is determined to become the hero of this story. As their journeys unfold in a series of unforgettable adventures, Yara and Adrena are propelled toward each other and transformative revelations about life, death, and destiny in this intensely captivating, irreverent epic.

James H. McCommons is a professor emeritus at Northern Michigan University and a veteran journalist, specializing in ecological, environmental, and travel topics. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Audubon, and Discover, among other publications. He is the author of Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service and Camera Hunter: George Shiras III and the Birth of Wildlife Photography.

An entertaining and expansive work of American history, The Feather Wars is the incredible story of how disparate characters—progressive politicians, free-thinking society belles, nature writers and artists, bird-loving U.S. presidents, gunmakers, business titans, and brave game wardens—came together to save hundreds of species of birds. Heroes, martyrs, villains, and conflicted do-gooders—the early bird conservation movement had them all. Together they transformed how Americans thought and cared about birds, forever altering the American landscape.

Sponsored by the Alan Ross Kumpe Memorial Endowment

Beronda L. Montgomery is writer, science communicator, and plant biologist. She was named one of the journal Cell’s Inspiring Black Scientists in America and awarded the 2021 Cynthia Westcott Scientific Writing Award, the 2022 Adolph E. Gude, Jr. Award for outstanding service to the science of plant biology, and the 2023 Hutchinson Medal of the Chicago Horticultural Society. Montgomery is author of Lessons from Plants.

In When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy, award-winning plant biologist Beronda L. Montgomery explores the ways seven trees—as well as the cotton shrub—are intertwined with Black history and culture. She reveals how knowledge surrounding these trees has shaped America since the beginning. Combining the wisdom of science and history with stories from her own path to botany, Montgomery talks to majestic trees, and in this unique and compelling narrative, they answer.

Sponsored by The Rebsamen Fund

Charly Palmer is a fine artist, an illustrator, the winner of the Coretta Scott King John Steptoe New Talent Award for Mama Africa!, and author-illustrator of The Legend of Gravity. He studied art and design at the American Academy of Art and fine art at School of the Art Institute, both in Chicago.

The stunningly illustrated How Sweet the Sound celebrates the history of Black music in America and features artists ranging from Miles Davis to Kendrick Lamar. Listen to the sound of survival, courage, and democracy—the soundtrack of America. Hear Billie Holiday’s raspy, mournful voice and tap your foot to Louis Armstrong’s trumpet. Scream with James Brown and bop your head to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five while looking for the 80+ references to artists like Robert Johnson, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimi Hendrix, Whitney Houston, Lauryn Hill, and Beyoncé.

Exhibition sponsored by Hearne Fine Art and Pyramid Art, Books, & Custom Framing

Robert Parkinson is professor of history at Binghamton University and the author of books including Heart of American Darkness: A Story of Murder and Revolution on the Early Frontier.

Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence is a narrative exploration of the 27 grievances listed in the document. It provides a “rogues’ gallery” of the American Revolution, delving into the people—the British rogues and tyrants—that lay behind each of the charges the Continental Congress listed as the reasons for America leaving the British Empire.

Sponsored in Memory of Buddy Villines

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short-story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Story Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Philyaw is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and co-host of two podcasts, Ursa Short Fiction (with Dawnie Walton) and Reckon True Stories (with Kiese Laymon). She is currently at work developing TV shows based on her short fiction.

In the much-anticipated, splendidly unruly debut novel The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, the wife of a popular and powerful megachurch pastor upends her charmed “rags-to-Rolex” life when her secretive past comes roaring into the spotlight.

Sponsored by the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation

Andrew Porter is the author of the story collections The Disappeared and The Theory of Light and Matter, as well as the novels In Between Days and The Imagined Life. He has received a Pushcart Prize and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and his work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories anthology, Ploughshares, and the Southern Review, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He teaches at Trinity University in San Antonio.

In The Imagined Life, Steve Mills has reached a crossroads. His wife and son have left, and they may not return. Which leaves him determined to find out what happened to his own father, a brilliant, charismatic professor who disappeared in 1984 when Steve was twelve, on a wave of ignominy. Steve drives up the coast of California, seeking out his father’s friends, family members, and former colleagues, and each conversation in the present reveals another layer of his father’s past, another insight into his disappearance. And, with every insight, Steve must confront truths about his own life.

Photo by Sarah E. Cooper.

Sponsored by UA Little Rock School of Literary and Performing Arts

Mayukh Sen is the award-winning author of Love, Queenie and Taste Makers. He is a fellow at New America and teaches film and television reporting and criticism at New York University. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Part cultural analysis, part backstage tour, Love in the Afternoon, and Evening is a love letter to the misunderstood, often-dismissed American genre of soap operas. Critics, friends, and soap opera obsessives Mayukh Sen and Charlotte Druckman invite readers into a conversation that ranges from topics both serious (race, reproductive rights, queerness) and fun (fashion! long-lost daughters! evil twins!). It will make you want to bust out your shoulder pads and binge your favorite show all over again.

Photo by Melanie Dunea.

Sponsored by CALS Adult Programming

T. L. Simpson is a nationally acclaimed novelist and journalist whose YA novel Cope Field was a 2026 Michael L. Printz Honor Book. A longtime newspaper editor in Arkansas, Simpson draws on his experience covering sports, crime, and community life in his fiction.

In Cope Field, when Craw is sentenced to community service for hitting his father in the head with a baseball bat, he accepts his punishment without objection, knowing he’s actually lucky. If he weren’t the son of a famous former baseball player, he’d probably have gotten it a lot worse. So, Craw keeps his mouth shut and takes what life gives him. Like always. But when he arrives at community service, he meets Hannah Flores, a punk rock enthusiast trapped in the Ozarks. As Craw navigates his own explosive home life, he learns more about hers. And as their friendship blossoms into something more, he begins to understand the importance of speaking his truth, even when doing so might destroy the only life he’s ever known.

Emily Soderberg was born and raised in Little Rock, only moving away to attend Washington University. She has lived in St. Louis ever since, because moving seems like a huge hassle. These days, she spends her free time up in the air as an aerial coach. She’d be tempted to run off and join the circus, but her cats prefer a more settled lifestyle. How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder is her debut novel.

In How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder, dogs are better behaved than people. Nikki Jackson-Ramanathan, a pet behaviorist, is invited to consult with Mrs. Van Meer, who is worried about her elderly hound dog and has plenty of cash to burn. When Mrs. Van Meer turns up dead and the cops start dogging Nikki’s every step, she resolves to catch the real killer.

Sponsored by the CALS Foundation

Carrie Lee South earned her MFA at the Arkansas Writers Workshop at the University of Central Arkansas, where she served as the fiction editor for the literary magazine Arkana. She is currently the fiction editor at Story Bottle Co. Her work has appeared in Waxwing, F(r)iction, and Iron Horse Literary Review, as well as on the Tales to Terrify podcast and elsewhere. In the Woods They Wait is her debut novel.

A park ranger at Arkansas’s Devil’s Den State Park becomes obsessed with the case of a missing child—a case that mirrors the disappearance of her own brother, whom she lost in the woods many years ago—and the possibility that both were taken by something vicious and unnatural that lives deep in the Ozarks. Utterly absorbing and disquieting, In the Woods They Wait is an enthralling page-turner, one that asks how far you would go for a sense of closure—and what you would be willing to face to get it.

Sponsored by Arkansas Times

Ragan Sutterfield’s writing has appeared in the Christian Century, the Oxford American, Plough, Birding Magazine, and more. Sutterfield’s previous books include This Is My Body, The Art of Being a Creature, Wendell Berry and the Given Life, and Cultivating Reality. Sutterfield is an Episcopal priest at Christ Church in Little Rock.

In Watch and Wonder: Birding as a Spiritual Practice, author and Episcopal priest Ragan Sutterfield has his vision opened by a rare flycatcher, learns the power of naming while watching shorebirds, and forges friendships at the Christmas Bird Count. Following a birder’s year, he draws on his three decades of experience to explore the ways in which birding touches our souls and hearts to form us into better humans.

Sponsored by the Alan Ross Kumpe Memorial Endowment

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney is the author of the New York Times bestselling novels The Nest (named a best book of the year by People, the Washington Post, and NPR) and Good Company (a Read with Jenna selection). She has been a guest on Today, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and NPR’s All Things Considered. Her work has been translated into more than 28 languages, and The Nest is in development as a limited series with AMC Studios. Sweeney, who holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, lives with her husband in New York City.

In Lake Effect, when Nina Larkin is given a copy of The Joy of Sex by her newly divorced friend, she can no longer dismiss the nearly nonexistent intimacy of her marriage. Just as her oldest child, Clara, is falling in love for the first time, Nina finds herself longing for the forbidden: a midlife awakening. An intoxicating fling with a prominent neighbor brings Nina a freedom she never thought possible—but also risks the reputations of both families and unravels Clara’s world, just as she stands on the threshold of adulthood.

Photo by Leyna Noelani Ambron.

Madeline Taylor is a fantasy romance author with a degree in English literature and creative writing. She loves to escape reality whenever possible, so reading and writing are great outlets for her. Her other hobbies include maladaptive daydreaming, listening to Taylor Swift, and being bossed around by a senile pug.

The fantasy-romance novel Heir of Illusion reveals an alliance between enemies and a weapon of untold power, giving rise to a bond that could rewrite fate. A fae assassin with the power of illusion, sworn to a king she despises, faces an enigmatic grim reaper searching for freedom. Enemies collide in an unlikely alliance, brimming with desire and destruction.

Hannah Whitten has been writing to amuse herself since she could hold a pen. Sometime in high school, she figured out that what amused her might also amuse others. Her books have been international bestsellers and translated into multiple languages. When she’s not writing, she’s reading, watching horror movies, or chasing her feral children.

Reliquary is the story of Claire, a woman set adrift by the loss of her temperamental fiancé. When his wealthy estranged family invites her to a wake on their private island estate, Harrow Point, Claire sees it as an opportunity to finally find the belonging she’s always wanted. But something old and hungry is waiting in Harrow Point, and belonging comes with a price.

Photo by Caleb Whitten.

Nikesha Elise Williams is a two-time Emmy Award–winning producer, an award-winning author, and the producer and host of the Black and Published podcast. A narrative strategist by day and journalist always, she had published her work in the Washington Post, Essence, and Vox. Nikesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and a DeGroot Foundation Writer of Note grantee. A Chicago native, she lives in Florida with her family.

The Seven Daughters of Dupree is a sweeping multi-generational epic following seven generations of Dupree women as they navigate love, loss, and the unyielding ties of family. It’s 1995, and 14-year-old Tati is determined to uncover the identity of her father. But her mother, Nadia, keeps her secrets close, while her grandmother Gladys remains silent about the family’s past, including why she left Land’s End, Alabama, in 1953. As Tati digs deeper, she uncovers a legacy of family secrets, where every generation of Dupree women has posed more questions than answers.

Sponsored by Little Rock Public Radio

Stacey Yu is a Chinese American writer who grew up between Texas, Arkansas, and California and currently lives in London. Kitten is her debut novel.

In Kitten, a young woman’s growing obsession with her boyfriend’s cat Silver opens new possibilities for her life—but not without threatening to unravel it. As Katie’s affection for Silver deepens, her other relationships begin to falter, until she’s forced to confront what she really desires from life—and what she might have to risk to get it. Darkly playful, wryly observant, and unexpectedly heartfelt, this enchanting debut from an irresistible new voice in fiction is a timeless reckoning with the uncertainty of becoming a person in an age that is as disorienting and lonely as it is full of hope and promise.

Sponsored by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette