No Ordinary Bird: An Evening with Artis Henderson

No Ordinary Bird is a compelling father-daughter story that reads like true crime, haunted by a question the dashing and mysterious Lamar Chester had always taught his daughter to ask: “How do you tell the good guys from the bad?”

Tombolo Books welcomes Artis Henderson to the bookstore to celebrate the release of her new memoir, No Ordinary Bird. Henderson's prose are filled with dramatic betrayals, dangerous drug lords, and geopolitical intrigue, but beyond that is the beating heart of this riveting memoir: a daughter’s grappling with a dark legacy and her memories of the father who had been the light of her life.

Henderson will be in conversation with fellow author and long-time friend Annabelle Tometich!

More about No Ordinary Bird

Artis was five when a plane crash killed her beloved father. For years, it was simply called “the accident.”

But many things weren’t getting discussed. Like Lamar himself—a swashbuckling, larger-than-life pilot, a doting father and husband, and the most popular farmer in Georgia. Or that the IRS had immediately taken everything: the chickens, the airplanes, the islands in the Bahamas. . . . Afterwards, Artis and her mother broke contact with everyone and fled, rebuilding from the bottom up as if Lamar’s big, wild life had never happened.

Years later, a friend tells Artis Lamar’s plane was sabotaged: her father had been one of the biggest drug smugglers in Miami in the 1970s. At the time of his death, he was about to testify in a trial that had swept up everyone from the Prime Minister of the Bahamas, to a US district attorney, to the Colombian drug cartels. But the deeper Artis digs, the more unexpected the story becomes.

Artis Henderson's work has appeared in the New York Times, The Daily Beast, Reader's Digest and Sierra, among others. Her first memoir, Unremarried Widow, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and named to more than 10 Best of the Year lists. Artis has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, the Columbia School of Journalism, and the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A certified master naturalist and advanced open water diver, she splits her time between Florida and Portugal.

Annabelle Tometich went from medical-school flunky to line cook to journalist to author. She spent eighteen years as a food writer, editor, and restaurant critic for The News-Press in her hometown of Fort Myers, Florida. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, Catapult, the Tampa Bay Times, and many more publications. Tometich has won more than a dozen awards for her stories, including first place for Features Writing from the Florida Society of News Editors in 2020. She (still) lives in Fort Myers with her husband, two children, and her ever-fiery Filipina mother. You can find her online at annabelleTM.com.

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