Robert Gwaltney: Sing Down the Moon - in Conversation with Susan Gilmore

Join us for an evening with Robert Gwaltney in conversation with Susan Gilmore. Gwaltney will be reading from his new novel Sing Down the Moon. A Southern Gothic tale of generational trauma, desire, and identity, Sing Down the Moonfollows a cursed teen heir to a mystical drug trade that binds the living to the dead. Blending myth and memory, the novel explores the cost of inheritance and the peril of self-erasure in a haunted world.

This is a free event. Get a 10% discount on the book when you RSVP on Eventbrite and present it at the bookshop register.

Sixteen-year-old Leontyne Skye longs to escape Good Hope, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia—and the cursed birthright that binds her to it.

For generations, the women of the Skye line have tended Damascus, an ancient fig tree whose siren song lures the dead across the river. The figs it bears are harvested to create Redemption, a drug that tethers the island to the dead, slowly consuming the Skye women from the inside out.

Leontyne’s mother, Eulalee, is already disappearing—memory, hair, teeth—into the salt-stung air. And Leontyne is unraveling too, since the accident known as Tribulation Day, when she lost her hand and all sense of who she was before. As her memories resurface in fractured pieces, and her childhood friends, Rebecca and Avery, twist truth to their own ends, Leontyne faces a cruel inheritance aiming to destroy her.

When Journey Wintergarden arrives, mysterious and magnetic, precarious relationships unravel, threatening to upend everything, derailing Leontyne’s plans to escape Good Hope. As desire, betrayal, and memory collide, the haints grow restless. Leontyne’s refusal to tend the tree means shattering the fragile balance between the living and the dead. Accepting her fate means becoming the Great Redeemer—and losing herself completely.

Robert Gwaltney, a recipient of the 2022 Pat Conroy Writers Residency, was named 2023 Georgia Author of the Year for his debut novel, The Cicada Tree. He resides in Atlanta Georgia where he is an active member of the Atlanta literary community serving as a board member for Broadleaf Writers Association. Robert’s work has appeared in such publications as Southbound Magazine, Southern Literary Review, The Blue Mountain Review, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. His forthcoming novel, Sing Down The Moon, which has been awarded the Somerset Award for Literary and Contemporary Fiction, will be published by Mercer University Press in the Spring of 2026.

Susan Gregg Gilmore is the author of the novels The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove, and The Funeral Dress. She has written for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. Born in Nashville, she lives in Tennessee with her husband.

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