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Karen Spears Zacharias

photo credit: Stephen Savage, Fairhope, Alabama


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Karen Spears Zacharias is a storyteller. Check out her work:

Mother of Rain: A Novel

(Coming, Fall 2013, Mercer Univ. Press) 

Karen Spears Zacharias has carved a brilliant gem of a novel out of hard, uncompromising times and lives. Her remote mountain setting conceals misery, mystery, and madness — but also love, which comes in many forms. Zacharias examines these intertwined lives with great compassion and daring; she is a wonderful writer.
- Lee Smith, author of “On Agate Hill” & “The Last Girls”
 
 
Karen Spears Zacharias captures the humor, spirituality and language of Appalachia with stunning authenticity, through characters that leap off the page. With Mother of Rain, Zacharias has done her part to help preserve our mountain heritage for
future generations.
-Amy Greene, author of “Bloodroot” 
 
An evocative and haunting debut. The unforgettable story of Maizee Hurd is one of hardscrabble life in the mountains of East Tennessee — a world filled with the mystery of the “old ways,” where loss and
tragedy are as commonplace as rain. With clarity and great compassion, Karen Spears Zacharias captures the fragility of the human heart. I could still hear the cadence of Appalachian voices long after I turned
the last page.
 -Todd Johnson, author of “The Sweet By and By”
 

The story of Maizee both shocks and endears the reader to Mother Of Rain, the beautifully,  eerie debut novel. Like a handcrafted wedding quilt, Zacharias’s prose weaves the tangle of hardscrabble lives into old fashion Appalachia storytelling.

-Ann Hite, author of “Ghost On Black Mountain”

 

Karen Zacharias’ journalistic eye served her well with her debut novel, Mother of Rain. Zacharias perfectly captures the haunting beauty and customs of Depression era Appalachia. Mother of Rain is a unflinching and compelling story of troubled love and redemption in a mystical time and place. Maize is one of those magical characters that readers will be thinking about long after the last page has been turned.

-Michael Morris, author of “Man in the Blue Moon” and “Slow Way Home.”

 

Touring with ANN HITE/ THE STORYCATCHER
CONTACT

 

 

OTHER WORKS:

A Silence of Mockingbirds: The Memoir of a Murder (MacAdam/Cage)

Will Jesus Buy Me a Doublewide? (Zondervan)

Where’s Your Jesus Now? (Zondervan)

After the Flag has been Folded (HarperCollins)

Benched (Mercer Univ. Press).

 

Karen Spears Zacharias is a daughter of Appalachia. She learned the craft of storytelling from her Aunt Cil Christian, of Christian Bend, Tennessee. She teaches journalism at Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington. Her work has been featured in the Huffington Post, New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Newsweek, National Public Radio, and CNN. She blogs at patheos.com

While serving as the writer-in-residence at the Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts, Fairhope, Al., Karen wrote A Silence of Mockingbirds: The Memoir of a Murder, the true crime story behind Karly’s Law.