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Sheryl Cornett

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup 2026 Sheryl Cornett

Sheryl Cornett taught English and Creative Writing at NC State University for many years before turning to writing full time. She and her husband divide their year between North Carolina and South Louisiana. Her poems, stories, critical essays, and creative nonfiction appear in numerous publications including North Carolina Literary Review, Image, Pembroke Magazine, Mars Hill Review, The Independent Weekly, and Art House America, among others. She is the winner of the 2026 Randall Kenan Literary Prize for her interview-essay with author Sharon Kurtzman, published in the North Carolina Literary Review.

 

Schedule

11:45 am to 12:45 pm
A.Z. Young Park, Author Tent B
Women and War: Secrets, Loss, and Survival
Sheryl Cornett, No Secrets in this House: A Novel
Karen Essex, Run, Darling
Elisa M. Speranza, Triage: A Novel
with moderator Miki Pfeffer

1:00 pm to 1:45 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

No Secrets in this House: A Novel

Historical fiction * Mystery * Love & Romance * The Generations * Island Life * ALL THE BOXES ARE CHECKED in this compelling new historical romance novel from Author Sheryl Cornett.

No Secrets in This House spans four wars, three generations, two continents, two continents, and one remote Outer Banks island.

Cornett’s debut novel, which publishes May 12, uncovers a dual-timeline tale of women on different home fronts nearly a century apart, though tied to the same home in an iconic village on the island thirty miles out to sea.

The late matriarch Avila was twenty years old, pregnant, and living on Ocracoke at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. Now her 1942-born daughter Clare, millennial granddaughter Maddie, and goddaughter Trish form a present-day family in the Home Waters cottage, haunted and scarred by war’s fallout—including secrets uncovered via a hidden stash of World War II letters. This history infuses their present-day losses and life-enigmas. Can the island’s magic help these women heal from their pasts, and walk boldly into promising futures?

Ocracoke Island, accessible only by ferry and protected by the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, keeps its small- town ways as a refuge against the hardships of a distant mainland. It is the perfect setting for this engaging beach read. The cleansing presence of Ocracoke’s watery world offers a sweeping yet intimate setting for reconciling secrets with truths, and the old way with the new.