Kathy B. Steele

I write about what I know about. South Carolina has been home for most of my life, so that’s the setting both of my first book, ‘Rocks That Float’, and my new e-book, ‘An Unfamiliar Sky’.

‘Rocks that Float’ focuses on the one block left of a dying Carolina mill town, “a place Flannery O’Connor would have loved,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Steele’s voice has the authentic and urgent quality of compelling folk art,” said the Charlotte Observer. The authenticity I owe to my family members who worked the mills, particularly my grandmother, who left her father’s dairy farm to work in the mill at the age of twelve. ‘Rocks that Float’ won the Independent Publisher Book Award for General Fiction in 2006.

In ‘An Unfamiliar Sky’, I trace the path of the World War II generation. I grew up hearing tales of the War years, of butter-rationing and newsreels and boys my aunts dated who didn’t come home. My father and my uncles had been to War. The fathers of all my childhood friends had been to War. We all had scratchy green Army blankets and metal canteens to use on picnics. Rucksacks that had been all over Europe hauled our books to school. The War was the backdrop of our lives, and we Boomers will forever be known as that generation’s children.