Dr. Zelda Lockhart is winner of the Lambda Literary 2024 Outstanding Novelist Prize. She holds a PhD in Expressive Art Therapies and an MA in Literature. Her other novels are Fifth Born, a Barnes & Noble Discovery selection and a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award finalist; Cold Running Creek, a Black Caucus of the American Library Association Honor Fiction award winner; and Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle, a Lambda Literary Award finalist.

Schedule

1:45 pm to 2:45 pm

State Capitol, Senate Committee Room A

The Weight – and Promise – of Family Legacies: Fiction

with Rosey Lee, Zelda Lockhart, and moderator Serena Puang

3:00 pm to 3:45 pm

Cavalier House Books Tent

Book Signing

Trinity: A Novel

The Hurston-Wright Award Finalist makes her long-awaited return with this electrifying saga — as moving and indelible as The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, The Turner House, and The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois — that explores three generations of a family trying to overcome trials and trauma and free themselves from the darkness of the past.

Lottie Rebecca Lee is spoken into the world in Fayetteville, North Carolina by a Black nurse who declares, “Lord Jesus, if that ain’t the blackest little baby born this side of heaven.” Later, Lottie will prove that she is the ancestors’ promise to unearth the Mississippi and Ghanaian atrocities that have tormented Benjamin Lee, her grandfather who was born during the Great Depression in Mississippi’s red clay tobacco fields, and Benjamin Junior, his son and Lottie Rebecca’s father, born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where the post Korean War GI Bill promises prosperity. These two generations of men are haunted by the Mother-Spirit who did not survive enslavement’s post-traumatic stress violence.

Trinity is the riveting story of the daughter-spirit born to stitch love back into the scattered wombs of her Black mothers and call love back into the fishing blues songs of her Black male kin. Lottie Rebecca Lee is the Divine spirited daughter born to set everything back up right again, in this daringly original novel.