In The Shadow of the Lone Star

Nineteen year-old Hallie Jess Milburn has found herself some trouble. Trouble keeping her Uncle Fred at arms length. Trouble finding work in the Negro community she's been adopted into. Trouble controlling her feelings for Cleveland Carper, the young colored man she's falling in love with. But these troubles pale in comparison to the trouble she finds herself in when Cleveland's brother Roy James is about to be hung for a crime he didn't commit.

B.J. Bateman After BJ quit her day job, she got serious and won a Non-fiction award in the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference and a first place fiction award and a first place nonfiction in Willamette Writers’ Kay Snow writing competition. She has had three short stories published in the literary magazine Perceptions, an essay in Our Turn, Our Time, an essay appeared in one of the Cup of Comfort series and one was included in Cup of Comfort Favorites. A short story placed in Oregon Writers’ Colony competition. Her most recent essay was published in November of 2010 when she was a winner in the Women Who Write national competition and her essay appeared in their Calliope, an anthology of winners. BJ has been a member of Willamette Writers for several years as well as a member of the same writers’ group for over ten years where Lone Star was born. She has taken workshops and classes from Northwest writers Molly Gloss, Tom Spanbauer, M. K. Wren, Craig Lesley, Sallie Tisdale, and Whitney Otto. In the Shadow of the Lone star is her first novel. She’s currently working on a memoir.