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Michelle St. Romain

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup 2026 Michelle St. Romain

Michelle St. Romain grew up in Louisiana and her work is inspired by her French heritage. She holds English degrees from Loyola University, New Orleans, and California State University, Sacramento, was a fellow in Bookgardan, and completed a residency at Craigardan in 2023. Her debut novel received the Bronze Medal for Southern Fiction by the Independent Publishers Book Awards and her writing has been featured in BookTrib, the Poetry Phone Line Project of the Oregon Humanities, The Rapids, and The Stanford Challenge Anthology 2026. She lives in Oregon.

 

Schedule

12:45 pm to 1:45 pm
A.Z. Young Park, Author Tent A
Tides of Fortune and Loss: Storms, Secrets, and Survival in Louisiana Fiction
Rod Davis, Life in the Time of Hurricanes
Vicki Salloum, A Gathering Place
Stephanie Soileau, Should the Waters Take Us
Michelle St. Romain, Song of Belonging: A Novel
with moderator Serena Puang

2:00 pm to 2:45 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

Song of Belonging: A Novel

For fans of Kate Morton, Amy Harmon, and Sally Page comes a multigenerational novel infused with touches of magical realism about a woman’s journey to find her place in an uncertain world as she unravels her family’s legacy.

2026 IPPY Book Awards Bronze Medalist in South Fiction

In 1934, a child’s death tears open a family and shakes the small town of Richarme, Louisiana. Recalling her grandmother’s hidden gifts that had been shut down decades earlier, Grace Paschal begins writing to her deceased daughter as she navigates grief and guilt for Lily’s death, which will haunt their French community for generations.

In 2019, Alice, Grace’s great-granddaughter, awakens in her apartment in Berkeley and opens a jewelry box given to her decades earlier upon Grace’s death. When she explores its contents, the lines between past and present fade. As she works to meet the demands of her career, her life turns upside-down when new and frequent memories that aren’t her own rise to the surface—memories that cause her to question everything about the life she has chosen.

A haunting and magical story of a family with hidden gifts and secrets, Song of Belonging follows Alice as she embarks on a journey to discover the truth about her ancestors and find her place in a lineage of women healers who protect the waters that surround their Louisiana home.