Join us for an evening with Robert Gwaltney to celebrate the release of his new novel, Sing Down the Moon, a Southern Gothic tale of generational trauma, the novel explores inheritance, identity, and addiction. It explores the legacies we carry, the ghosts we inherit, and the costs of breaking free. Robert will be joined in conversation by Kimberly Brock, Ann Hite, and Lo Patrick. This event is free and open to the public. Registration requested.

Author Bio:

Robert Gwaltney, a recipient of the 2022 Pat Conroy Writers Residency, was named 2023 Georgia Author of the Year for his debut novel, The Cicada Tree. He resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is an active member of the Atlanta literary community serving as a board member for Broadleaf Writers Association. Robert’s work has appeared in such publications as Southbound Magazine, Southern Literary Review, The Blue Mountain Review, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. His forthcoming novel, Sing Down The Moon, which has been awarded the Somerset Award for Literary and Contemporary Fiction, will be published by Mercer University Press in the Spring of 2026.

About the Novel:

Sixteen-year-old Leontyne Skye longs to escape Good Hope, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia—and the cursed birthright that binds her to it. For generations, the women of the Skye line have tended Damascus, an ancient fig tree whose siren song lures the dead across the river. The figs it bears are harvested to create Redemption, a drug that tethers the island to the dead, slowly consuming the Skye women from the inside out.

Leontyne’s mother, Eulalee, is already disappearing—memory, hair, teeth—into the salt-stung air. And Leontyne is unraveling too, since the accident known as Tribulation Day, when she lost her hand and all sense of who she was before. As her memories resurface in fractured pieces, and her childhood friends, Rebecca and Avery, twist truth to their own ends, Leontyne faces a cruel inheritance aiming to destroy her.

When Journey Wintergarden arrives, mysterious and magnetic, precarious relationships unravel, threatening to upend everything, derailing Leontyne’s plans to escape Good Hope. As desire, betrayal, and memory collide, the haints grow restless. Leontyne’s refusal to tend the tree means shattering the fragile balance between the living and the dead. Accepting her fate means becoming the Great Redeemer—and losing herself completely.

About the Conversation Partners:

Kimberly Brock is the award winning author of The Fabled Earth, featured as a Must Read in Fall of 2024 by Town & Country Magazine, and The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare, which spent three weeks on the Southern Independent Booksellers Best Seller List. Both novels have been shortlisted for the prestigious Townsend Prize for Fiction. Her debut novel, The River Witch, was the recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year Award. Kimberly has been featured on the History Channel’s ‘History’s Greatest Mysteries,’ and is the founder of Tinderbox Writers Workshop, a transformative experience for women in the arts. A former actor and special needs educator, she speaks widely on the creative life and southern and historical fiction, serving as a guest lecturer for many regional and national writing workshops including at the Pat Conroy Literary Center. A native of North Georgia, she now lives near Atlanta where she is at work on her fourth novel.

Ann Hite has written six novels and two nonfiction books. Her short story collection, HAINTS ON BLACK MOUNTAIN, was the bronze winner in the 2022 Foreword Indies Book Awards. She has been shortlisted for the Townsend Prize and nominated for the Pushcart. And she has been awarded Georgia Author of the Year. Her passion for history and Appalachia heavily influences her writing. Her latest book with Mercer University Press is I Am a Georgia Girl, The Life of Lucille Selig Frank.

Lo Patrick is a former lawyer and current novelist living in the suburbs of Atlanta. Her debut, The Floating Girls, earned a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, was a finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction, and was a Reader’s Digest Editor’s Pick. It was named by the Georgia Center for the Book as a Book All Georgians Should Read. She is also the author of The Night the River Wept, and Fast Boys and Pretty Girls. Her next novel, The Sins of Summer Daughters, releases July 14, 2026.