We reached way back in the archives to our first season and one of our very early guests, Amy Attaway of the Kentucky Shakespeare Theater. If you are a book nerd like us, it just doesn’t seem like summer in Louisville without seeing one of the great free performances under the stars in Central Park of one of the Bard’s plays.

Our guest today, Julia Royston, is a former school librarian who began her first publishing company as a way to publish her own books in the exact way she wanted them. She jokes that she has “control issues”. But those issues led her to become an entrepreneur who now owns and operates two publishing companies that have been around for over 12 years, in an age when most businesses are lucky to make it past the 3-5 year mark. BK Royston Publishing and Royal Media and Publishing, located in Southern Indiana, are her two full service imprints that primarily publish black authors; one focusing on children’s, inspirational, and religious books and the other publishing more mainstream fiction such as mysteries, urban fiction, and romance.

In our episode this week, Amanda talks about how she became involved with the Jane Austen Society of North America--Greater Louisville Region and what their meetings are like, how it seems the things she can learn about Jane Austen’s books and her time period are endless, and why newbies shouldn’t feel intimidated, and why the Louisville chapter of the society is known as the Fashion region.

Are you a reader that shies away from dystopian or pandemic themed books because they just seem too scary in our current reality or do you “lean in” to the darkness and find it “fun”?

Our guest this week, Giselle Spurgeon, is a reader who has long had a fascination with this sub-genre of work.

This week we branch out away from Louisville and venture out into the state to the Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky, where our guest this week resides. Bobi Conn is a technical writer by day and author whose first book, In The Shadow of the Valley, was published this past May by Little A Publishing, the literary imprint for Amazon.

It’s officially summer. The kids are done with school and it feels like time to relax a little after a stressful spring. Wouldn’t we all like to be sitting on a beach, by a lake, or on a shaded porch reading the perfect book? But not everyone’s plans are what they once were with the uncertainty that has plagued us in 2020. Maybe our biggest escape is through the pages of a book. Our guest this week is someone we trust to help us with finding that book. We are excited to welcome back friend of the show and bookseller Sam Miller, from Carmichael’s books here in Louisville KY.

Our guest this week, James Markert, is a Renaissance man. He was a tennis pro for over 20 years, a bookstore owner, a screenwriter, and the author of 5 historical fiction novels. His first novel, A White Wind Blew, focused on some local Louisville history with the story of the Waverly Hills Sanatorium, one of the largest facilities in the country for tuberculosis patients during the TB epidemic in the early 1900s.

We thought it would be fun for our 1-year anniversary recording and 47th episode to put ourselves in the hot-seat, and fortunately, Carrie’s daughter, Norah, agreed to ask us the questions. Like a lot of 16-year-olds, she was excited to do it the night before but seemed to be completely bored and uninterested during the actual interview. She yawned and Pinterest-ed her way through our answers, which may be what a lot of our listeners do as well as they listen to it.

Our guest this week, Hannah Rose Neuhauser, is the co-founder and program director of The Young Author’s Greenhouse, an organization inspired by the 826 Valencia writing organization for children and teens launched by author Dave Eggers.

Our guest today, Robin Weiss, had a different kind of quarantine goal. She was determined to revitalize her reading life. This mother of 9 who is also a professor of public health as well as a childbirth expert and doula, fell out of love with reading when she attended grad school. In the intervening years, her knowledge of new titles and authors got stuck in a time warp where she left off in the 1990s. So, she formed an online quarantine bookclub with fellow readers across the country to help get her literary groove back.