The new and augmented edition of my debut novel, The Cherokee Rose, will be released by Random House on June 13th!
The novel tells the story of three women who uncover the secrets of a Georgia plantation that holds the intertwined histories of Indigenous and enslaved Black communities. If you’re a fan of Kindred (Butler), Bring on the Blessings (Jenkins), Blanche on the Lam (Neely), The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois (Jeffers), Drowning in Fire (Womack), The Inn at Lake Devine (Lipman), or even Cheap Old Houses (HGTV, Instagram), this book is for you. First published in 2015 by the independent southern press Blair, the new edition includes new and rewritten scenes, a twist to the ending, a new introduction that addresses the tremendous, recent changes in the Cherokee Nation regarding the citizenship and standing of descendants of Cherokee freedpeople, and a bonus essay that will soon appear in the Oxford University Press collection titled Historical Fiction Now.
The launch event for the book was an author chat last weekend organized by Fulton Street Books and Coffee for the Black Wall Street Legacy Festival in Tulsa. The festival and event organizers were warmly hospitable, and it was moving to be in that place for this purpose. The remarkable founder and owner of Fulton Street Books, Onikah Asamoa-Caesar, pointed out that the Greenwood Cultural Center where we were standing had been built not only on the hallowed ground of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, but also on the former nineteenth-century allotment of a Cherokee Freedman family. My conversation partner for the chat was the esteemed Marilyn Vann, a veteran leader of the Freedmen Descendants’ movement and now a Cherokee Nation government officer.
The Cherokee Rose starts with an Alice Walker poem, “Women,” which ends with the line: “A place for us.” One of the things I wanted to present in this novel was a direct, yet sensitive discussion of the meaning of historic places to diverse people and their communities today. The combined experiences of the characters suggest that difficult places in the past where our ancestors dwelled can and should be recovered as sites of memory, psychic touchstones, and material homelands.
As the new introduction details, I had the benefit of reader feedback while revising the novel and crafting new scenes. One of those past readers was Alyssa Napier, who now helps to edit Carrying Capacity while holding down a day job at a university press. Alyssa created this fun fan art featuring the main female characters who reluctantly meet at the Cherokee Rose Plantation on a holiday weekend in 2008: Jinx (smart but stuck in a rut), Ruth (downcast and a tad bit surly), and Cheyenne (savvy and self-aggrandizing with a bad case of house lust). After I saw Alyssa’s picture of the characters, I fell in love with them all over again.
I am so excited to usher this new edition of The Cherokee Rose into the world. It somehow feels like having fraternal (sororal would be truer) twins because the 2015 and 2023 versions of the story are comfortably similar but surprisingly unique.
The Cherokee Rose will be out soon in paperback (at independent bookstores, Amazon, Target, etc.) and audiobook featuring the actress Shayna Small (and me at the beginning and end; another tale yet to be told!).
If you’re intrigued and your budget is cushioned, I hope you’ll pre-order the book, share news of the release with your circles, and post reviews on Amazon or Goodreads. Pre-orders are important in the publishing world, I have lately learned. They can ignite a book’s visibility and shore up a publisher’s support. And if you’re in Oklahoma, I hope you’ll visit Fulton Street Books. Thank you for your support! I’ll be posting more about the novel soon because I just can’t help myself!