We are thrilled to host the acclaimed authors, Kathleen Rooney and James Kennedy, in-conversation about their respected new novels, From Dust to Stardust and Bride of the Tornado. A sweeping journey from the dawn of the motion picture era through turbulent twentieth-century America, From Dust to Stardust is a breathtaking novel about one determined woman navigating change, challenging the price of fame, and sharing the gift of real magic. In the mind-bending horror-thriller, Bride of the Tornado, a young woman's secretive midwestern town is engulfed by a mysterious plague of tornadoes every generation–and she must escape it before it claims her.

This event is free with registration, to register, please CLICK HERE. 

More About the Books From Dust to Stardust: From the bestselling author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, comes a novel about Hollywood, the cost of stardom, and selfless second acts, inspired by an extraordinary true story. In 1916, Doreen O’Dare is fourteen years old when she hops a Hollywood-bound train with her beloved Irish grandmother. Within a decade, her trademark bob and insouciant charm make her the preeminent movie flapper of the Jazz Age. But her success story masks one of relentless ambition, tragedy, and the secrets of a dangerous marriage. Her professional life in flux, Doreen trades one dream for another. She pours her wealth and creative energy into a singular achievement: the construction of a one-ton miniature Fairy Castle, the likes of which the world has never seen. So begins Doreen’s public tour to lift the nation’s spirits during the Great Depression—and a personal journey worth remembering.

Bride of the Tornado: In a small town tucked away in the midwestern corn fields, the adults whisper about Tornado Day. Our narrator, a high school sophomore, has never heard this phrase but she soon discovers its terrible meaning: a plague of sentient tornadoes is coming to destroy them. The only thing that stands between the town and total annihilation is a teen boy known as the tornado killer. Drawn to this enigmatic boy, our narrator senses an unnatural connection between them. But the adults are hiding a secret about the origins of the tornadoes and the true nature of the tornado killer—and our narrator must escape before the primeval power that binds them all comes to claim her. Audaciously conceived and steeped in existential dread, this genre-defying novel reveals the myth-bound madness at the heart of American life.

More About the Authors: Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a collective of poets and their vintage typewriters who compose poetry on demand. Her most recent books include the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her poetry collection Where Are the Snows won the 2021 X. J. Kennedy Prize. She is a winner of the Ruth Lilly Prize from Poetry magazine and the Adam Morgan Literary Citizen Award from the Chicago Review of Books.

James Kennedy is the author of the delightfully bizarre Young Adult novel The Order of Odd-Fish, awarded the Smithsonian Notable Book for Children 2008 and the ALA 2009 Best Books for Young Adults Nominee. He is also the author of the mind-bending and emotional speculative thriller, Dare to Know. Before becoming a writer, James was a computer programmer with a degree in physics and philosophy.