Stacia Pelletier & Donna Coffey in Conversation

Join us for an evening with Stacia Pelletier, the author of The Deliverance of Barker McRae, and Donna Coffey, the author of Wofford's Blood. The authors will be signing copies of their books directly after the event.

About The Deliverance of Barker McRae

It's a wintry April 1833 in Watkinsville, Georgia. Fourteen-year-old Barker McRae is stuck living with her odious uncle, militia captain Wiley Wood, as she waits for her father, a Methodist circuit rider, to return. Instead, a stranger arrives. Matthew Higgenbotham, a land lottery messenger who dreams of leaving Georgia, shows up at Wiley's farm with unexpected news: Barker has won forty acres in the latest state lottery. His announcement sets in motion an act of unimaginable violence, a harrowing escape, and a cat-and-mouse chase across frontier Georgia during America's first gold rush and the illegal seizure of Cherokee lands. The Deliverance of Barker McRae weaves fiction and meticulously researched history to introduce readers to two travelers, thrown together by luck and duty, on an adventure neither of them wanted. This is a tale about trespass, frontier religion, fathers and daughters, and friendships between unlikely companions.

About the Author

Stacia Pelletier is a historical novelist and author of three novels: The Deliverance of Barker McRae (Mercer University Press), Accidents of Providence (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and The Half Wives (Harper/Mariner). She has been nominated twice for the Townsend Prize in Fiction, Georgia’s highest literary honor. Stacia holds an MDiv and a PhD in the history of religion from Emory University. She has been a Robert W. Woodruff Fellow, a W.M. Keck Foundation Fellow, and was awarded a 2025 Hearst Foundation Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. A writer with a day job, Stacia currently serves as executive director of corporate and foundation relations at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

About Wofford's Blood

"Wofford's Blood is an epic family saga saturated in Cherokee and North Georgia history. It is 1815, in the contested borderland between the state of Georgia and the Cherokee Nation, and 13-year-old J.D. Wofford, son of a Cherokee mother and a white Intruder father, must choose where his loyalties lie. He spends his winters in his mother's Cherokee world and his summers in his father's world: Wofford's Settlement, the most notorious Intruder outpost in North Georgia. In the Cherokee world, J.D. is a tsila, an apprentice to a medicine man. A trip with his uncles to Kentucky to kill a buffalo earns him his Cherokee name, Tsuskwannunawata, and his manhood ceremony. In the white world, J.D. and his best friends Jimmy and Tony, an enslaved member of the household, call themselves the Thunder Boys. All part Cherokee, they swear an oath of loyalty to one another. When J.D.'s cousin Meley Jane is abducted and Tony's father Carolina is falsely accused, the three boys must ride into the Cherokee Nation to rescue Meley Jane from a band of white outlaws and save Carolina from being lynched. At the end of the fateful journey, the boys' childhood is over. Rifts over Cherokee identity and slavery have forever splintered the Wofford clan. The novel is based on the true history of James Daugherty Wofford, who led a detachment on the Trail of Tears and was one of the main informants for Smithsonian ethnologist James Mooney's Cherokee History, Myths and Sacred Formulas"--

About the Author

Donna Coffey Little has been a Professor of English at Reinhardt University since 1997. She is the Founder of Reinhardt's Low-Residency MFA Program. A transplant from Virginia, she holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, an MA in Comparative Literature from UNC Chapel Hill, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program. Her most recent essays have appeared in Five Points, StorySouth, Georgia Backroads, The James Dickey Review, and Tiferet. Recent poems have appeared inThe Atlanta Review, The Florida Review, and Leaping Clear. Her poetry chapbook Fire Street was published by Finishing Line Press in 2012, and her novel Wofford's Blood was published by Mercer University Press in 2024.