Completely Booked - Official Podcast of the Jacksonville Public Library

Jami Attenberg  is the author of seven books of fiction including  Instant Love ,  The Kept Man ,  The Melting Season ,  The Middlesteins ,  Saint Mazie , and  All Grown Up.  Her most recent novel is  All This Could Be Yours  (2019). She is also the author of the memoir  I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home  (2022). Attenberg has written about food, travel, books, relationships and...

Nat Glover was born in 1943, in segregated Jacksonville, Florida. At seventeen, he unknowingly headed into an angry white mob and the Ku Klux Klan attacking young black protestors staging a sit-in at a downtown whites-only lunch counter. Known as "Ax Handle Saturday," this harrowing encounter with racism would commit him to a lifetime of fighting for justice. He joined the Jacksonville Police Depa...

The Spirit of Place Tim Gilmore is a prolific local history author who has written extensively about Jacksonville. As the writer and creator of  www.jaxpsychogeo.com , a project that explores place and catalogs the Southern Gothic, he has told more than 700 stories of strange and historic locations in and around Jacksonville, Florida. He has also published 22 books. "Ever since UNF English Profess...

Cat Sebastian  writes queer historical romance. Her books have received starred reviews from  Kirkus ,  Publishers Weekly ,  Library Journal , and  Booklist , and she's been featured in the  Washington Post ,  Entertainment Weekly , and  Jezebel . She was born in New Jersey and lived in New York and Arizona before settling down in a swampy part of the South. When she isn't writing, she's probably...

The Legacies We Leave Behind For many childhood summers, Mark Woods piled into a station wagon with his parents and two sisters and headed to America's national parks. Mark's most vivid childhood memories are set against a backdrop of mountains, woods, and fireflies in places like Redwood, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon national parks. On the eve of turning fifty and a little burned out, Mark decided...

Sohrab Homi Fracis 's new book of North Florida and elsewhere stories,  True Fiction , won the 2023 International Book Award for story collections. American Book Award winner Rilla Askew says of it: " True Fiction  is a tour de force." Fracis is the first Asian American author to win the Iowa Short Fiction Award, described by the New York Times Book Review as "among the most prestigious literary p...

Tracey Enerson Wood  loves discovering amazing women whose stories have been lost to history and bringing them to life for today's readers.  Her debut novel,  The Engineer's Wife , historical fiction about the woman who built the Brooklyn Bridge, is an international and USA Today bestseller. Her newest book,  The President's Wife , is centered on Edith Bolling Wilson, the second wife of Woodrow Wi...

Hank Phillippi Ryan  is the  USA Today  bestselling author of 14 psychological thrillers, winning the most prestigious awards in the genre: five Agathas, five Anthonys, and the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award. She is also an on-air investigative reporter for Boston's WHDH-TV, with 37 EMMYs and dozens more journalism honors. National book critics call her "a superb and gifted storyteller"; she's t...

Deb Rogers ' novel  Florida Woman  was published in July 2022 by Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins. Called "a bewitching debut" by  Publisher's Weekly ,  Florida Woman  was featured as an Indie Next Pick by the American Booksellers Association. Deb has lived and traveled throughout Florida working as an educator, policymaker and victim advocate, and she now lives on the Atlantic si...

Beatriz Williams  is the  New York Times, USA Today , and internationally bestselling author of  Our Woman in Moscow ,  The Summer Wives ,   Her Last Flight ,  The Golden Hour ,  The Secret Life of Violet Grant ,  A Hundred Summers , and several other works of historical fiction, including four novels in collaboration with fellow bestselling authors Karen White and Lauren Willig. A graduate of Sta...

In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means...

Anyone can be a writer – even an accomplished chef! The first step is deciding what you'll write about. It could be something you're passionate about or particularly skilled in... Or could it simply be the book (or cookbook) you think is missing from the world! Dennis Chan  grew up in Jacksonville, where his family has owned twelve restaurants in the past eight decades. His earliest memories of fo...

Dr. Wayne W. Wood, Hon. AIA.  Widely regarded as one of the foremost chroniclers of Jacksonville's history and architecture, Dr. Wayne Wood has been called "the undisputed godfather of preservation in Jacksonville." An author, historian, artist, and retired optometrist, Wayne is the founder of Riverside Avondale Preservation, the Riverside Arts Market, and Friends of Hemming Park. He is the author...

Michael Wiley 's new novel is  The Long Way Out , featuring Franky Dast, an exonerated ex-con who investigates a series of murders in Northeast Florida. Michael is also the author of three mystery and detective series, including the Shamus Award-winning Joe Kozmarski books, the Daniel Turner thrillers, and, most recently, the Sam Kelson PI novels, which are currently in development for television....

Leela Corman  is a painter, educator, and graphic novel creator, working in the realm of diaspora Ashkenazi culture and third-generation restorative work. Her books include the  Unterzakhn  (Schocken/Pantheon, 2012), which was nominated for the Eisner, the L.A. Times Book Award, and Le Prix Artemisia, and won the ROMICS Prize for Best Anglo-American Comic. Her latest, a short comics collection cal...

Jessica Q. Stark  is the author of  Buffalo Girl  (BOA Editions, forthcoming April 2023),  Savage Pageant  (Birds, LLC, 2020) and four poetry chapbooks, including  INNANET  (The Offending Adam, 2021).  Savage Pageant  was named one of the "Best Books of 2020" in  The Boston Globe  and in  Hyperallergic . Her poetry has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in  Best American Poetry ,  Poetry Soc...

Aaron Woodson  is a Florida-based military combat veteran who has served in the US Air Force and US Air National Guard for over 15 years. He began his military career participating in military campaigns such as Operation Iraqi Freedom and Inherent Resolve. At a very young age, Aaron began to nurture an interest in and passion for poetry. He began to write poems at school and his love for writing g...

Christopher Gorham  is a lawyer and teacher of modern American history at Westford Academy, outside Boston. He has degrees in history from Tufts University and the University of Michigan, where he studied under legendary historian Sidney Fine. Gorham has a J.D., summa cum laude, from Syracuse University College of Law, where he served on the editorial staff of the Syracuse Law Review. His writing...

Author  Jessica Hatch  is a professional freelance editor and novelist with more than a decade of publishing experience. She worked her way through the slush pile at New York-based literary agencies like Writers House, New Leaf Literary & Media, and Fox Literary Management, and learned what attracts readers to a book at St. Martin's Press. Jessica's editorial clients have gone on to receive partia...

Deborah Goodrich Royce 's thrillers examine puzzles of identity.  Ruby Falls  won the Zibby Award for Best Plot Twist in 2021 and  Finding Mrs. Ford  was hailed by  Forbes ,  Book Riot , and  Good Morning America 's "best of" lists in 2019. She began as an actress on  All My  Children  and in multiple films, before transitioning to the role of story editor at Miramax Films, developing  Emma  and e...

Kristy Cambron is a vintage-inspired storyteller writing from the space where art, history, and faith intersect. She's a Christy Award-winning author of historical fiction, including her bestselling novels,  The Butterfly and the Violin  and  The Paris Dressmaker . Her work has been named to Cosmopolitan's Best Historical Fiction Novels of 2021, Publishers Weekly Religion & Spirituality TOP 10, Li...

Valerie Bowman 's debut novel was published in 2012. Since then, her books have received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly, Booklist, and Kirkus. She's been an RT Reviewers' Choice nominee for Best First Historical Romance and Best Historical Romance Love and Laughter. Two of her books have been nominated for the Kirkus Prize for fiction. Valerie grew up in Illinois with six sisters (she's n...

Madeline Martin is a New York Times and international bestselling author of historical fiction and historical romance. She lives in sunny Florida with her two daughters, two incredibly spoiled cats and a husband so wonderful he's been dubbed Mr. Awesome. She is a die-hard history lover who will happily lose herself in research any day. When she's not writing, researching or 'moming', you can find...

In her self-published novel, Seen, Julie G. Delegal takes a story straight from Jacksonville's headlines and tells a fictional version that explores a similar event from two perspectives. Join us to chat with Julie about the process of fictionalizing true events and how she was inspired to write this novel! Julie G. Delegal  is a freelance journalist and author who lives in Jacksonville. Her novel...

Chris Barton and Alton Yates in conversation with local educator TiLena Robinson discussing Chris's book Moving Forward, a nonfiction children's book about Alton's roles in Space Age military experiments and in Jacksonville's 1960 civil rights sit-ins that culminated in Ax Handle Saturday.  Chris Barton is the author of picture books including bestseller Shark vs. Train, Fire Truck vs. Dragon, Sib...