The Sunflower

I wrote The Sunflower, which is the second book in The Art of Rivers series, because Beth and Graham Jackson, the characters I introduced in The Mystic (Book One in the series) wouldn’t leave me alone. Seriously, though, the premise of the novel was born when I visited the Mississippi Delta as part of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. Along with dozens of other educators, I traveled from Jackson, Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee, visiting historic locations and meeting some of the civil rights leaders who still carry the torch today. It was an extremely emotional experience during which I listened to first-hand stories about what it was like to navigate the political tensions in the deep South during the hottest era in civil rights history: the 1960s. I knew that I wanted to capture some pieces of that experience in a book, and the Jacksons were the right characters to inhabit that story.