BookFest 2011 ~ featuring Leah Stewart at Knickers!

We're so excited to be welcoming Leah Stewart to Knickers for BookFest 2011 Saturday, June 18th from 10am to 1pm!

I fell completely in love with Leah's writing when I read her book The Myth of You and Me many years ago. It's a fabulous story about the sole-mate kind of friendships we have when we're younger. It's a must read for anyone who's had that very best friend in high school and/or college, and lost touch thru the years.


Her new book, Husband and Wife has just been released in paperback. You'll love this writers ability to create characters that are real, messy and trying to figure things out just like the rest of us.

Here's a little more about Leah. I hope you'll stop by Knickers and meet this very special author. You'll also be able to purchase her books, which will come with our new Summer Reading bookmark that offers you savings on your purchases at Knickers all summer long!

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Leah Stewart was born in 1973 at Laughlin Air Force Base inTexas, where her father was stationed. As a child, she lived in Virginia, Idaho, England, Kansas, and Virginia again. She went to high school in Clovis, New Mexico, a town featured in her second novel, The Myth of You and Me. She always wanted to be a writer.

At Vanderbilt University, Leah was the editor of the student newspaper, the Vanderbilt Hustler, and spent summers interning for the Tennessean in Nashville and the Commercial Appeal in Memphis. The latter experience inspired her firstnovel, Body of a Girl. After college, Leah went to the MFA program at the University of Michigan, and then moved to Boston, where she put her master’s degree to work by taking a job as asecretary for the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She had an office with a door, and she wrote most of her first novel there.

Since then, Leah has worked as a secretary at Duke, a cataloguer in a used bookstore, a magazine editor, a copyeditor, and a staff member at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She has been a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, Sewanee, and Murray State University. The recipient of a 2010 NEA Literature Fellowship, Leah teaches in the University of Cincinnati’s creative writing program, and lives in Cincinnati with her husband and two children.

Hobbies, Interests & Enthusiasms...

Lately, because of my daughter taking classes, I've developed a fascination with the ballet. It's a little late for me to start, but I do take a fabulous dance/exercise class called Rhythm & Motion at the Cincinnati Ballet, where my daughter takes her classes. We also have season tickets and I've been surprised to find how much I enjoy the performances. Historically I've been so focused on language that it's been harder for me to enjoy the art forms without it (classical music, say), so the ballet is broadening my aesthetic horizons. I've interviewed one of the dancers here in hopes of including a ballerina character in my next book.

I also really, really like television. And reading blogs by very smart people who write about television, like Heather Havrilesky at Salon. I swear I'm not just zoning out on the boob tube—a season of a TV show has a lot in common narratively with a novel. Much more than a short story or even a movie.