Local Authors

Writers Live Everywhere. Even Here.

We’d like to introduce you to just a handful of your local authors, the people we work with the most. They’re in the store, stopping by to shop, to visit, to drop off more books. We love them and they love us. Here’s your chance to show them some support.

Rachel Hawkins/Erin Sterling

The Kiss Curse (2022), Reckless Girls (2022), The Ex Hex (2021), The Wife Upstairs (2021)

New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hawkins is a store favorite. In addition to suspense novels and books for young readers, Rachel also writes romance novels under the pen name Erin Sterling.

Ash Parsons

You’re So Dead (2021), Girls Save the World in This One (2020)

Award-winning author Ash Parsons is a graduate of Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Clown College as well as other, more traditional schools. Ash has spent some time stumbling around as a zombie on The Walking Dead.

Chad Alan Gibbs

Bardo by the Sea (2022), The Rome of Fall (2020), Two Like Me and You (2019)

Chad Alan Gibbs is the author of three novels. His debut novel, Two Like Me and You, won the 2019 Rubery Book Award for Young Adult Fiction and was named a Best Book of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews. In addition, he has authored three non-fiction books, written for CNN.com and The Washington Post, and for three years wrote an award-winning humor column in the Opelika-Auburn News on his life as a stay-at-home dad.

Justin Gardiner

Justin Gardiner is the author three books—the long-form lyric essay Small Altars, winner of a Faulkner-Wisdom Nonfiction Book Award and published by Tupelo Press in 2024; Beneath the Shadow: Legacy and Longing in the Antarctic, by the University of Georgia Press; and the poetry collection Naming the Lifeboat from Main Street Rag. In 2012-13, Justin served as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Fellow, living for a year at an off-grid homestead in the middle of the Rogue River Wilderness in southern Oregon. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at Auburn University and serves as the nonfiction editor of The Southern Humanities Review. “

Anton DiSclafani

Anton DiSclafani was born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in Ocala, Florida. She graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts from Washington University in St. Louis, where she taught for several years. She is currently a professor of English at Auburn University, where she teaches Creative Writing.

Maria Kuznetsova

Something Unbelievable (2021), Oksana, Behave! (2019)

Maria Kuznetsova was born in Kiev, Ukraine and moved to the United States as a child. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Maria lives in Auburn, Alabama with her husband and daughter, where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University. She is also the Fiction Editor of the Southern Humanities Review and The Bare Life Review, a journal of immigrant and refugee literature.