Hub City Press to publish new novel from Minrose Gwin

Hub City Press is pleased to announce it will publish Minrose Gwin's fourth novel, Beautiful Dreamers, in the Fall of 2024. 

It’s 1954 when ten-year-old Memory Feather and her mother, Virginia, abandon their hand-to-mouth existence in the squalid El Camino Motel Lodge in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and are welcomed home to the Mississippi Gulf Coast community of Belle Cote by Virginia’s childhood friend Mac, whose verve and energy buoy the “sad and mad and lately divorced” Virginia to embrace this new chapter. Memory is an unusual child with a quiet but fierce intelligence. Attuned to the musings of animals and plants, her ears, she says, are “set at a different pitch,” while two fingers missing from her twisted left hand since birth provides a visual marker of the ways she is unlike her peers. Mac, too, has faced challenges. While his wealth, brains, and good humor have allowed him to carve out a niche in Belle Cote, his position as a gay man and his work in the Civil Rights Movement expose him to censure, harassment, and even brutality.

When Tony Amato arrives in Belle Cote, he sets in motion a series of events that will forever change Mem’s life and those of the people around her. As Memory, now an adult who has become a biologist who studies the wading birds of the Mississippi Sound that comforted her years ago, recounts the story of the mark he left on her teenage years, she must also confront her own role in the disastrous events of that final summer.

"I’m delighted to release my fourth novel, Beautiful Dreamers, with Hub City Press," says Minrose. "I’ve always been fascinated by how place and history shape us into who we are and who we may become in what Eudora Welty called 'the crossroads of circumstance.' I feel fortunate indeed that I will be taking this journey with the extraordinary Hub City editors and staff."

Minrose Gwin is the award-winning author of the novels The Queen of Palmyra, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise, which was shortlisted for the Willie Morris Award in Southern Literature; and The Accidentals, which received the 2020 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Award in Fiction. She has also published a memoir, Wishing for Snow, about the collision of poetry and psychosis in her mother’s life, and four books of literary and cultural criticism, most recently Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement. She was co-editor of The Literature of the American South, a Norton anthology, and The Southern Literary Journal.

Like the characters in her novels, Minrose Gwin is a native of Mississippi. She began her writing career as a journalist and later taught at universities across the country, most recently the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her partner, Ruth Salvaggio, and several unruly four-leggeds.

For more information about Minrose’s memoir and novels, see minrosegwin.com.