Photos submitted Seven years ago, Alex George founded the Unbound Book Festival with the mission of bringing together readers and writers to create diverse communities, exposing participants to new ideas and authors. Since then, it has grown to become a nationally recognized literary festival, right in the heart of Missouri. Unbound brings together authors of […]

Photos by L.G. Patterson Growing up, Nina Mukerjee Furstenau was raised between two cultures. As a toddler, her family left India and immigrated to Chicago and then to Pittsburg, Kansas. While her parents spoke Bengali at home, Furstenau otherwise had a typical Midwest upbringing, with summers spent playing softball and going to county fairs. So […]

Just three years ago Skylark Bookshop opened its doors with a plan to do more than just sell books. Their purpose was to build community within their walls. That’s why Alex George, owner of Skylark and a novelist, started planning for a book club at the local, independent downtown bookstore back in 2020. He envisioned […]

Photos by LG Patterson What do the University of Missouri’s president and a fiction novel about the California gold rush have in common? A writer named Gordy Sauer. As Mun Choi’s speech writer and an about-to-be-published author, Sauer believes fiction and speech writing have a lot of parallels. “Speech writing is for someone, so you […]

photos provided by kevin doyle Local author Kevin Doyle is living a double life. But, unlike the characters in mystery and detective novels like the ones he writes, his second identity isn’t a secret. As both a novelist and high school English teacher, Doyle juggles two worlds: the world of books and the world of […]