Dawn Major was named 2024 Finalist for Georgia Author of the Year for best first novel. She is an associate editor at Southern Literary Review and has an MFA in creative writing. She was a recipient of the James Dickey Review Literary Fellowship and Dr. Robert Driscoll Excellence in Writing Award. Major is a member of the William Gay Archive and advocates for southern writers via her blog SouthernRead.

Schedule

12:45 pm to 1:45 pm

State Capitol, House Committee Room 2

Coming of Age: Exploring Otherness in Fiction

with Dawn Major, Karen Spears Zacharias, Susan Beckham Zurenda, and moderator Mary McMyne

2:00 pm to 2:45 pm

Cavalier House Books Tent

Book Signing

The Bystanders

A DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY SEEKS A DO-OVER IN A QUAINT TOWN, BUT IN ADDITION TO PACKING UP THEIR OWN PERSONAL DEMONS, THEY DISCOVER THE LOCALS AREN'T SO WELCOMING.

The quaint town of Lawrenceton, Missouri isn't sending out the welcoming committee for its newest neighbors from Los Angeles - the Samples family. Shannon Lamb's "Like a Virgin" fashion choices, along with her fortune-telling mother, Wendy Samples, and her no-good, cheating, jobless, stepfather, Dale Samples, result in Shannon finding few fans in L-Town where proud family lines run deep. Only townie, Eddy Bauman, is smitten with Shannon and her Valley Girl ways. 

The Bystanders is a dark coming-of-age story set in the 1980s when big hair was big, and MTV ruled. In a quiet town of annual picnics and landscapes, the Samples' rundown trailer and odd behaviors aren't charming the locals. Shannon and Wendy could really use some friends but must learn to rely upon themselves to claw their way out of poverty and abuse if they want to escape Dale.

The Bystanders pays homage to Americana, its small-town eccentricities, and the rural people of the Northern Mississippi Delta region of Southeast Missouri, a unique area of the country where people still speak Paw Paw French and honor Old World traditions.

"Without a doubt, Dawn Major is thoroughly schooled in the full-blown existence of jealousy, lust, love, confusion, pettiness, mystery, violence, hope, et al, exhibited by small-town denizens..[The Bystanders] stands tall in the world of coming-of-age novels" - George Singleton, author of You Want More: Selected Stories

"Intelligent, humorous, and sublimely original...a master tapestry of rural Missouri life in the 1980s..." - Robert Gwaltney, award winning author of The Cicada Tree

"Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty move over, there is a new voice on the stage, Dawn Major's first novel, The Bystanders, is about to enter the ranks of Southern Literature." - J.M. White, Author of Pulling Down The Sun and The Beyond Within