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Katy Simpson Smith

Biography

Katy Simpson Smith

Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of the novels THE STORY OF LAND AND SEA, a Vogue best book of the year; FREE MEN; and THE EVERLASTING, a New York Times best historical fiction book of the year. She is also the author of WE HAVE RAISED ALL OF YOU: Motherhood in the South, 1750–1835. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Oxford American, Granta and Literary Hub, among other publications. She received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in New Orleans.

Katy Simpson Smith

Books by Katy Simpson Smith

by Katy Simpson Smith - Fiction, Women's Fiction

A Mississippi woman pushes through the ruin of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. Crawling along the stones, she wonders how she has landed here, a reluctant botanist amid a snarl of tourists. In 1854, a woman pushes through the jungle of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. As punishment for her misbehavior, she has been indentured to the English botanist Richard Deakin, for whom she will compile a flora. If only the woman she loves weren’t on a boat, with a husband. Through a list of seemingly minor plants and their uses, these women calculate intangible threats: a changing climate, the cost of knowledge, and the ways repeated violence can upend women’s lives. They must forge their own small acts of defiance and slip through whatever cracks they find.

by Katy Simpson Smith - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Spanning 2,000 years, THE EVERLASTING follows four characters whose struggles resonate across the centuries: an early Christian child martyr, a medieval monk on crypt duty in a church, a Medici princess of Moorish descent, and a contemporary field biologist conducting an illicit affair. Outsiders to a city layered and dense with history, this quartet separated by time grapple with the physicality of bodies, the necessity for sacrifice, and the power of love to sustain and challenge faith. Their small rebellions are witnessed and provoked by an omniscient, time-traveling Satan who, though incorporeal, nonetheless suffers from a heart in search of repair. As their dramas unfold amid the brick, marble and ghosts of Rome, they each must decide what it means to be good.

by Katy Simpson Smith - Fiction, Historical Fiction

In 1788, three men converge in the southern woods of what is now Alabama. Cat, an emotionally scarred white man, is on the run after abandoning his home. Bob is a talkative black man fleeing slavery on a Pensacola sugar plantation, and Istillicha, edged out of his Creek town’s leadership, is bound by honor to seek retribution. The makeshift trio commits a shocking murder that soon has the forces of the law bearing down upon them. A probing French tracker named Le Clerc must decide which has a greater claim: swift justice, or his own curiosity about how three such disparate, desperate men could act in unison.

by Katy Simpson Smith - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Set in a small coastal town in North Carolina during the waning years of the American Revolution, THE STORY OF LAND AND SEA is a debut novel that follows three generations of family --- fathers and daughters, mother and son, master and slave, characters who yearn for redemption amidst a heady brew of war, kidnapping, slavery and love.