Hi, welcome we're gonna get started. Welcome to indies introduce. My name is Jess stopper. So indie
introduce was developed with the goal of discovering new voices and building relationships between the new bookstores and debuts. This program is now in its 12th year, and it's one of my favorite things that I do at ABA. So the book sellers here on stage have spent four months reading and discussing submissions to come up with a group of new voices and stories that they're very exciting to share with everyone here. There are flyers on the table. Those are also available for download in the CI 2024 app, as well as on bookweb.org you will hear a little bit more from the booksellers in a minute about the whole process. And if it's something booksellers that you think sounds interesting, feel free to email me. I keep a list of potential readers for future seasons. Would love to have as many of you as possible. Also, there's one author who is not with us today, Joanna Taylor, is with us in New Orleans, but the digital review copy of her book that goes super is available on Adobe's or download. We are lucky to have nine of our time authors here today. We're so excited to hear from you all, and now I'm going to turn it over to Holly Warner, the chair of the students
panel. You Yeah,
so I'm Paula weincop. I'm the owner of red balloon bookshop in St Paul, Minnesota. This year, we are celebrating 40 years of connecting kids with great books and authors who create those books. So this is one more way we are doing this. I just want to say that this indie introduced program is one of the things that ABA does for us, that I think is fantastic. So I encourage you all, once you hear about all these authors, wonderful books, that you bring them into your stores, and then that you also make sure you're on adabytes That you're reporting to book scan, so that people know the impact we're having. And if you're unsure about how to do that, talk to anybody at APA or there's a book scan and ADA bytes table out there as well. Okay, so let's see what. When Jess first reached out to ask if I would do this panel, I hesitated because, as I'm sure many of you can relate to I'm busy, and I just didn't know where I would make time to read all the books, but I also knew that it would get me to read a wide range of books, and it did. And so now I have all these books that I love that I otherwise wouldn't have known about.
The other the other
thing about this process that I really enjoyed was now we're here with all the authors, so we've been able to connect with them and share in their excitement for being a debut in this introduce author. So I encourage you all to do this if you get the
opportunity. I also really
enjoyed meeting the other booksellers
who are up here with me
and all the thoughtful book conversations we had, so I want to turn it over to them so they can introduce themselves.
I guess I'll go first. My name is Donald Liu. I'm a bookseller at Kepler's books in Menlo Park, California. And so just to say a little bit about the process and what I
learned, something you enjoyed or something that surprised
you. Okay, okay, great. Um, well, I think remember one thing that's the surprised me was in the process was how it kind of like hacked my brain and hacked my reading. You know, I've always heard the whole like 50 pages, and then you'll get a good sense, oh no, I need to read a whole book. And I really think it got me to really get a grasp of the book early on and know whether or not it was worth it for me personally to continue. And, you know, I just again, yeah, I agree with Holly. Read so many great, great books, ones that didn't make it on the list. And I guess my number one surprise was just, I don't know how much fun I would have. I knew it would be fun, but I was just how much fun was kind of impressive.
I'm Lily Taliaferro. I am the kids buyer manager at Eagle harbor book company on Bainbridge Island, Washington. I think one of my favorite parts about this whole process was just getting to nerd out about all these different books every other week, with people from all across the country and different sort of store models, different sizes, getting to see what people were loving, the pieces that maybe I didn't pick up on in a book. And then was like, Oh, wait now I have to go back and read all of it again. So that was really fun.
Hi. I'm Emmy Weidner from changing hands bookstore in Phoenix, Arizona. Thanks. I was just thinking about the whole process. I've been a bookseller for over 10 years now, and, you know, reading is our job, and it becomes kind of a job. And I think you can get in a reading rut, almost to sorts where you kind of gravitate towards the same books that are similar to your your favorite authors. You know, you read the little blurbs that the the reps spit out and you think, oh, that sounds like something else I've read. So the thing I like most about this whole process was being assigned books out of my comfort zone helped me kind of rediscover the just reading for pleasure, because the magic of of you know that discovery is in the unexpected and not being in control. So I love just being handed the big pile of books and being told, you know, give all these chance and and, yeah, they're not all books. I would have picked myself, and I couldn't have been more delighted by that,
and I'm Sally Sue Levine, and I'm the owner of the storybook shop in Bluffton, South Carolina. Thanks, everybody. I will echo what they all said. I got to, got to read outside of my comfort zone, and discovered books that I never would have picked up on my own that I loved and that now I want to champion, and I am grateful for that. I'm grateful for this group of wonderful people that I now call friends. And the other thing I would say is, if you get the chance, it looks and it feels like it takes a lot of time, but it's worth the journey. It is amazing, and we will discover so much magic in it. All right, thank
you. Thanks for sharing a bit about that. Oh, okay, so now, just so you know all the authors who are on the stage, and let's see, I'll just, I'll go through our list here, and if you can just raise your hand, or actually, you
know what I think, what we'll do is, I'll
go through here as I introduce you, if you can each tell us something about what you want this room of booksellers to most know about your book. That would be great. And Ka Cobell with your book
looking for smoke, why don't you start
us off?
I'll give the fish. So looking for smoke is a general thriller that follows four teams on the reservation as they're grabbing with the murder of a classmate who they each have a fraught relationship with and because each of them are the last to see their life, they all become subsidized. And if they want to play their names, they're going to have to trust each other, even though one of them could
be the murderer. And this
novel also shines a light on the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women, which is an issue that plays both the US and Canada.
All right, awesome. Thank
you. And just so you know, in a minute, we're going to hear a little bit about the books, and then we all have questions for them. So, okay, Freddie Gulch with now conjures, why don't you tell us about your book?
Alright, so my book, the thing that, like the copy, has been saying about it, is that it's a queer the craft, which is not totally far off. It's about a covenant of kids who could do real magic that actually works in a small town in Massachusetts in 1999 but if there's something I could tell you, all right, now that probably isn't going to be in any of the copy that you can read on a website. It's that, in a lot of ways, this is a love letter to Bradbury, something like it. This Way Comes, your kids got to be more overtly in it. But instead of being about the end of childhood, it's about grief.
All right, thank you. Okay, let's next. Next to you is Amy Lin, and let's hear about the spindle of faith. Hi,
everyone. So
the spindle of faith is a Chinese little pathology inspired middle grade adventure. It's about 12 year old Evie may Wong, who has to rescue her mother from the 10 ports of Chinese hell. So it's got action, it's got some scares, because innocent in hell, but it's got a lot of paper, I guess. The one thing I would like to tell you is bccb describes it as if Pixar made a horror movie, and I don't think I can sell it any better than that.
All right, awesome. Thank you and, and I'm just really, you all got yourself in order. You guys are awesome. Okay, next is Daisy Garrison, with six more months of June.
Hi, I'm Daisy, and six four months of June is like a coming of age story about the last month of high school. And it's definitely like a first love story, but it's more so just about growing up friendship and like, kind of grappling with the amount of an effect that a person can have on you, and then still kind of figuring out who you are independent of and because of all of that,
all right, wonderful. Thank you. Oh yeah. Go. Go ahead, John.
Yeah, John. John Cochran was breaking into sunlight.
So my book is a middle grade book about a child facing his father's addiction, and it's rooted in my own family experiences, like the boy at the center of the book, I love struggling with addiction and felt powerless to help them. It's honest, because kids who are facing this need to feel seen, to know they're not alone, and because I also wanted kids and grown ups around them to understand the dynamics of addiction in families, because these kids really need the understanding and support of people around them, and they also need hope. So ultimately, the book is good news. It's set in eastern North Carolina, which is a part of what I love in the summertime. And it's on a Blackwater River. It's on a sorry, it's on the Blackwater River that the main character explores with a couple of new friends, Megan Charlie, who he finds out and his friendship as much as he needs theirs. And that's ultimately, ultimately ultimately what the story's about. It's about the power of friendship to help us find our way forward to the good lives we deserve despite pain and loss.
All right, thank you, John.
And next to John, you
have Josh gazarra With
get ready for this title,
the great cruel Ranch Dorito in the sky.
Hi everybody. I like to describe the great Ranch Dorito in the sky as a fun book about grief. And to me, that was the magic trick, like, can I put up and I write a book that people will really enjoy reading and but still tackle this really challenging subject matter, but it's also very much a book about love and about how family and even found family can be transformative. In the pitches, you have a 16 year old male protagonist, Brett, who is struggling to accept he's afraid of what's going on with his adoptive mother, who has been diagnosed with cancer, and her illness is terminal, and he is, you know, funneling all of this anxiety and fear into an escalating eating disorder, his binge eating and when his food journal that his counselor is asking him to Keep, when that gets into the wrong hands and becomes public, he can no longer hide behind his fictions, and he has to start facing his real life narrative, as hard as that may be, and the way he finds his way through that is through friendship, and especially friendship with an unexpected source, a girl at school, Mallory, who seems to know a lot More about Brett's issues than he does? And you know, maybe through those friendships, he'll be able to face the most unfathomable loss bravely. Yeah, it's very much a anti diet culture book, anti fat phobia book, very much a body liberation book. And then those are the things that I think are important to know about it, all
right? And actually, now we're going to come
back over this way and hear from G Heron Davis about the book The Lonely below,
personal support. Hi. So the lonely below is middle grade bar mystery, kind of about this little girl named Eva who is new in school because her grandmother passed away, so her parents kind of have to go deal with that. She's kind of left behind a little bit, and it's basically her trying to deal with grief while also dealing with, you know, ghosts at this new school, which is a lot, so she's not really sure what's kind of the ghosts and what's just sort of, you know, her own feelings, really, I think what is Important to know about this is that the is autistic, and there's not a whole lot of representation about autistic kids in general, but like autistic black kids, is just like unheard of. And as an autistic black kid, I felt it was important to you know, put that out there. So
yeah, thank you. All right, okay, now we're gonna go to Steven Banbury with the pumpkin and the Forever night.
Hi, this come through. All right. So what I'll say about pumpkin princess in the Forever night is, early on, my an editor told me the book smells like straw, and that's been my favorite, like note and compliment to this. I don't know if she meant it as a compliment. That's been my favorite thing I've heard to this day. And I say that because it was always meant to be an ODE or a love letter to kind of the feelings of autumn, that sense of life getting colder yet weirdly more cozy at the same time darker yet more colorful, eerie, but like way more fun. And that sense of family, belonging and love that tends to grow around that season, and that love and kind of family was always what was going to be at the heart of pumpkin Princess, to me. So I guess what I'd like people to know is this story about, you know, an orphan finding her family, and that, I hope, like the setting and talking scarecrows, offers a fun world of escapism for readers. But, but more than anything, I hope, kind of Eve my protagonist personal, personal journey of finding her family and struggling with being adopted potentially offers Reed or something a little deeper as well.
All right, thank you. And kala Williams, we'll hear about a little bit about your book, tangle root.
Hi, so tangle root is a story of noni Reed, who is 17 years old, on the cusp of adulthood, whatever that means, and she's really unhappy that she's moving from Boston to a home in central Virginia with her perfect mom, who's a scholar and brilliant college president, and this is a home that her enslaved ancestor built, but she feels no connection to this. Instead, she gloms on to the grave of a white woman, a white girl who's her same age, who's buried in the family cemetery on the property, and in discovering more about this girl, she discovers a trove of secrets that could upend everything that she knows. So tangle root is a story of hidden bloodlines, of kin and questions of knotted legacies, and it asks what happens when you inherit your family's secrets? But it also speaks to some dialog that we're having today. What do we do with monuments that no longer serve us? How what are the real histories of black communities that were destroyed and erased, and how do we respond to politicians and others who try to take books away from bookstores and libraries and who try to obscure our true histories,
all right? And then again, what one author is unable to be with us. So I just want to say just a little bit about the ghost keeper by Joanna Taylor. This is a graphic novel. The illustrations are incredible, and it's the story of a therapist who treats ghosts. And yeah, so a ghost therapist a graphic novel, and this character is just so wonderful and hopeful, and the story is delightful. It's a story also about about grief, but a lot about belonging and the power of connection and love. So all of these, you know, what a what a great collection of books. So let's give them all a round of applause.
All right, and I'm going to hand it over to Sally Sue, who has a question for
Ka looking for smoke is such a moving novel? Was there one singular experience that set you to write, write the story.
Looking for smoke wasn't inspired by any singular event. I first started writing looking for smoke because I wanted to write Blackfeet characters into a book. Because, one, I never saw that growing up, and two, because I have so much pride in my Blackfeet culture, and I really wanted to show that. And looking for smoke was inspired more from a lifetime of experiences and childhood memories and family teachings, and I tried to draw on all of that to make the characters and the setting feel really authentic, I wanted to honor my community and my culture by putting them on the page, and I also honored my family by using a lot of their names throughout the book, like looking For smoke is actually my fifth great grandfather's name. So it was really special to put so much of myself and my family into the book.
Thank you. All right. And Donna, you have a question I think, for
all right. Hi, Freddie, okay, so the members of North Coven, you brought them to just in my mind, like glorious Technicolor, and I would just love to hear your inspiration for the different characters. And,
yeah, tell us about them. Okay, thank you. So, um, I think, like, broadly, I'm drawing from my own years, but for reasons that might not be totally what you think. Like, obviously, yes, we were gay, we were goth, we were kind of misfits. And they're all those things too. But really, there's this quality that a lot of teenagers, specifically or adolescents, have when they're exploring themselves of or a way that adults respond to them where they almost treat kids like they're an embarrassment, especially the kids you don't like. They don't do the right things, they don't say the right things, they're awkward, they don't look that good and even really loving, adults will respond to them as if they're afraid that the adolescents will be embarrassed in an adult way, instead of just letting them, you know, make what I wouldn't class as mistakes, but explorations. So I wrote this for everyone like me who was a little bit embarrassing and grew up to be like a kind and loving person anyway.
All right, thank you. Okay, and now back to Sally Sue, and you have a question for Amy,
good afternoon. Amy, so you wrote the most fantastical underworld, and I just was wondering which level Did you love writing the most, and why was it your favorite?
First of all, I love this question. So for some context, Chinese, the Chinese underworld is in 10 levels or courts. And I think I first should mention that everything in that we see in the spindle of fate in Hell is drawn or inspired by something from an existing Chinese source. My favorite is probably the seventh court, which is the tower of looking home. So it's a tower where the dead are see they're seeing their hometowns, their families. And I think that's so interesting, because it doesn't really sound like torture, but you're seeing, you know, oh, you know, your family has fallen into ruin. You know, your granddaughter is married some loser like, so it's kind of funny, but I think it's interesting where one I think I like it because it's more psychological, like torment and I but I think also it does speak to something about the themes of the book, about, you know, how even after people are gone, you know you are still like, that connection lingers on.
So all right, great. Thank you. Let's see. I'm going to hand it over to Emmy, who has a question for Daisy.
Hi, Daisy. I was telling a friend how well drawn your characters are, how reading your story made me feel like I was in a teen rom com. You really nailed the dialog. The anxiety is that on the cusp there's something bigger feeling that hits you senior year. How did you get into the headspace to write such wholly formed and vibrant characters?
Thank you so much. I my i grew up like two doors down from our public high school, and I was obsessed with high schoolers and teenagers. Like since I was so little, I would run home from elementary school to, like, walk the teenagers walking to lunch and walking home. And I felt about like the graduation day in my town, the way kids feel about like Christmas, like, like they would shut down our street, and everyone would try to catch a glimpse of and so I've always been obsessed with that period of time. And yeah, I knew that I wanted to write a book about high schoolers. And I know that like, tropes and like kind of classic High School cliches are, you kind of can't write a book or talk about this kind of book without all of them, and you can't really sell a book without talking about them. And so I tried my best to to be aware of and to use those different kind of classic labels to the extent that the kids in the book would be kind of grappling with them and having to deal with them because they're in high school, and then also to to subvert them as much as possible, hopefully, just because as I, as I got into the story, I came to, like, love the people I was making up and sort of want, wanted more for them, if you will.
All right, thank Thank you. Okay, now it's my turn to ask a question. So this is a question for John. So in his book, I loved every single one of the characters, and I loved how you brought me into their emotional space as they navigated heartbreaking situations. Right now we don't have time to talk about all the wonderful characters in his book. So for now, can you just tell us a little bit about Reese and what your inspiration and process was for creating him.
Thank you very much. So probably 75% of the work of revision from first to final was working on Reese and trying to get into his head and trying to bring his voice forward. And a big guide for me in doing that was something called the Seven C's, which were developed by a guy named Jerry Moe who works with kids who are dealing with addiction in their families. And I mentioned it in the author's note. And do you mind if I rattle them off, the seven C's are, I didn't cause it. I can't cure it. I can't control it, but I can take care of myself by communicating my feelings, making healthy choices and celebrating myself. And that that really told me. It told me where Reese begins in his journey, where he's at when the story begins. And it tells me where he's going, and the beginning he is in a kid, sort of kid sized way. He's very much trying to control his dad's addiction, trying to cure his dad's addiction, and he's not communicating with anyone completely shut down because he's so afraid and so ashamed. And it's, you know, his journey is internalizing those lessons, and that's where the good news of the of the story really lies. And then another big piece of it, my son and his friends were about the same age Reese's when I was writing the book. So I was listening to the voices of 12 and 13 year old boys, and, you know, watching them. I don't think it's true for every writer, but for me, I think coming I came from journalism. It's a sort of second act. And it I mean, journalism is very much my brain is wired. It's very much based on observation and fact gathering. And I think so it was important. I don't know that I don't know that I could have written Reese realistically until I was living with a 13 year old boy, so that was helpful.
Yeah, great. Thank you. All right, Emmy, you have a question for Josh. Hi, Josh. Hi.
So often in why lit and movies, we see girls navigating insecurities, body shaming, mental health struggles, friend drama. I love seeing these issues from a teen guy's perspective, especially one as thoughtful as Brett's what inspired you to write about these topics and share Brett's story?
Thank you. Emmy, yeah, I think the answer is twofold. First of all, I at the time when I wrote this book, was in treatment myself for disordered eating, and I had experienced that for about 20 years, and most of those years, I didn't know that there was a problem. Boys don't talk about these issues with their bodies as openly as girls do, and it kind of took a pretty intense escalation of that behavior for me to recognize that I needed to seek help. And I had this question in my head, like, what would have happened if some of these things had been lifted, if I had been able to recognize what was going on when I was 1516, years old? So it started from this, really, like personal place, but also a lot of my creative research is centered around men's issues and masculine performance. And I think one of the most like violent and traumatic things that patriarchy does to boys is it polices them and conditions them into what you know one research call, researcher calls a body psychotic condition where there's there becomes this disconnect between the mind and the body and the spirit. And so often, what happens with men is then to rely almost primarily on their intellect and their ego to survive in the world and to get by. And that is not how women and femme people are socialized. They have these rich networks of friendships and so much love outside of romantic relationships. And I thought, what if I could, in my subtle ways, plant these sort of seeds that you know, in some ways, would maybe give a reader permission a boy, permission to be vulnerable with other boys, to be intimate with other boys. That that doesn't have to be about sexuality. It's great if it is, but if it's not about that, that is important too. So yeah, I had this question in my head for a long time about like as a man, how do you be like an active feminist, not just someone who's supporting women and no, yes, equality and equity, that's important. But how do you how do you actually live that life? And as an artist, I'm a book artist and printmaker, and as a writer, I recognize, well, these are the you need to address these things directly in your work and through your stories. Because, as you know, everyone in this room knows positive social change so often it begins in our stories. If we can kind of see what a better world looks like, even if it's just a few little steps in that direction, we can then see ourselves living those lives and be moving in that direction. And that's what I really wanted for boys. I
Yeah, go
ahead. Donna, all right,
I have a question for G, which is the lonely below is so satisfyingly spooky, like I scared myself silly reading it. How did you balance the very real and dark history you touched on with the supernatural elements. And was it tough to do so for a young audience,
Hi, happy festa.
Happy festa.
So for me, I feel like the the darkness and, like, the dark history was kind of like one in the same really. And I think that's kind of something that is true for a lot of black people and like other marginalized people. Like everything that has happened to us within America has been a mess, basically, and so, like a lot of the times, you can sort of dig into, like family history, but also just like cultural history, and you know, it kind of intertwines all of these supernatural elements as well. Like, for me, I grew up hearing that like the light over your oven is like a ghost light, or like an ancestral light. So it kind of, it kind of ties, ties together. And I think writing that for a young audience wasn't too difficult for me, because usually I'm kind of thinking in that, in that kind of realm anyway, because a lot of a lot of the fears that Eva has, and like a lot of the thought process that she has, are things that I've gone through myself, um, and I wasn't diagnosed as a kid, so my autism journey is pretty recent, and so while writing Eva, it was like, kind of like looking back at my childhood and being like, Oh, that's not something that most kids would think about. Like, she has a lot of fear around death and dying and things like that, and that's something that used to terrify me as a kid, and so I just, I just really was able to drill down and think about all the stuff that used to scare me that still kind of does scare me And and, you know, work through it that way.
Yeah, thank you. G, okay, and our last two questions, Lily is gonna ask,
hi. This is a question for Steven the pumpkin Princess and the Forever Knight. Reads like an ode to your classic fairy tale and folktale What was your inspiration for this cozy, spooky story and its eclectic cast of characters?
Thanks. I'm glad you bring up folktales, because honestly, folktales was one of the inspirations for the book. There's something I've always loved about legends and old lore and the fact they always feel like like, dirty and earthy and grounded, while also being magical and different and like, it was that same mix that had me so excited to write pumpkin Princess, because the world felt darkly, darkly mysterious and intriguing and unique in my head, and because I knew we were going to experience through Evelyn, our main my main character, I knew it was also grounded in real, palpable emotions. She's She's a living girl that's adopted by the pumpkin king and brought to the land of the undead, and she starts experiencing belonging and being new to a place, while also being new to a family for the first time and new to being a daughter to the first time. And there's a lot of emotion there that I think grounded kind of the more surreal fun setting, and when it came to kind of fine tuning that world around her, I did, I selfishly wanted it to be a place I personally want to spend a lot of time knowing I was going to be spending a lot of time writing it. And that's where it quickly became that that love letter to autumn I was talking about earlier. At one point, I even said, If fall was a theme park, what would the rides be? And then I themed my chapters off those rides. So, you know, like corn mazes and haunted forests and creepy houses. I also I read a lot of farmernacks for the lore, they're amazing. If no one's ever read a farmer's own deck, I highly recommend it. I also play a lot. I play too much of a cozy farming video game called Stardew Valley. Oh, I love everyone here so much right now. And then, my grandparents are Portuguese, and they've grown up farming, and farming is in our DNA. And like a lot of like the random stuff that feels made up about farming in the book from my grandfather, like swearing at basil, but honestly, I think what really beyond the folklore side of it and the lore side of it was like Eve's relationship with her Evelyn's relationship with her adoptive father, the pumpkin king. Them, them getting to know each other. Them hugging for the first time, them having this like normal father daughter, dynamic, but in the most unnormal way possible, had me so excited. And it's a story that's continuing in a sequel, in Book Two, and watching and writing and watching their relationship grow right now is so fun. That's what's inspired me this whole time, is them growing as a father and daughter and family.
Thank you. So my last question is, for kalayla, while reading tangle root, you can tell an immense amount of research that went into it, what was your writing process like in terms of research and honing in on that importance of ancestral history?
Thank you for the question, and it is so hard to follow, because everybody's responses have been so profound and exhilarating and meaningful. So I'm just so grateful to be up here with these amazing minds. So as far as the research for tangle root, yes, I tangle root gets into the heads. We see the diary entries of of the enslaver who is buried on the property. And we, we, we hear her voice. We also hear a narrative that was that was given to to sort of like, think about the WPA, the Works Progress Administration. There's a sort of fictional WPA in this where we have people who are recording the stories of formerly enslaved people. So we have the voice of someone who is formerly enslaved. And this, this, this documentation was taken in the late 18, late 1800s I believe I'm right. It's been a minute, and it was hard getting into these voices, getting into the voices of of the person who was formerly enslaved. I had to read a lot of it's really hard to get we've got the WPA narratives. But I also read voices like Rosetta Douglas, who's the daughter of Frederick Douglass. I found her letters at the Library of Congress, and they're digitized, so anybody can look at them, and some of the letters of her brothers, Emily Davis, who was a free woman living in the 1860s in Philadelphia, who left behind diaries, really short snippets. But there they are, Charlotte forten, another black woman who was living in in the Philly area and also in South Carolina, in Beaufort, actually, yeah, she left behind diaries Harriet Jacobs so and even looking at the Hannah crafts, who is a who wrote a fictional book. But just looking at that, getting the voices of black women who would live around this time, writing from the perspective of an enslaver, was tough. That was tough. It is tough to humanize someone, and you have to, otherwise it's not fair. It is tough. And writing about her as a human being was really, really hard. So these are two specific aspects of history that really, for me, took the most research because they were the hardest to do faithfully. Now, obviously there's some fictional liberties taken with this, but I really tried to capture the spirit of these individuals, and there's other elements of we've got an ancestor who works on stage and finds the dark side of being on stage in the early 1900s and I had to discover a lot of that. So research has to be filmed through. It has to be filtered through. What can we today gravitate towards, and what can we today learn from these voices? So we don't, I don't. I didn't necessarily interpret them, you know, verbatim. Some I did, but, but most I didn't, but, but I wanted something that our readers could, that my readers could cling to, that they could discover about themselves in the voices of these people. Because as I'm going through and looking at all these letters and primary sources, I'm discovering about myself too, and I'm really learning elements of the past that are hard, but that are incredibly, incredibly important and and say something about who we are.
Awesome. Thank you. I'm going to turn it back over to Jess for our next instructions, but I also just wanted to acknowledge that there are also two other booksellers who could not be here today with us, so I want to thank them. Promicia from solid state in Washington, DC and Katie, and I'm forgetting their last names, sorry, from McLean and Aiken in Michigan, right? Okay, I want to thank them as well, because they did a lot of work along with us. And again, let's, let's thank all of these authors for giving us all these great books. To our readers,
thank you. Thank you, everyone for being with us. To our booksellers for all your hard work, to our authors for sharing your books. We are go the authors are going to sign now, most of them next door, so you're going to go out these doors and around. Stephen Banbury will be signing at the later this evening and Come get some book signed. Y'all. Thank you so much. Have a good rest of your Day. You
