Literary Notes: Actor, author and mom to chat about her new romance novel Tuesday
A Virginia Beach author with a string of credits acting on TV and Off Broadway, and who now home-schools her kids, has a new Afro-Filipina romance novel published by Avon. She’ll talk about it Tuesday in a Zoom event with Prince Books.
She’s Preslaysa Williams; the book, “A Lowcountry Bride.” In it, an aspiring bridal designer returns to Charleston from New York to help her ailing father. She finds a job at a boutique run by a widowed veteran who’s trying to save his late mother’s business and reconnect with his daughter.
In a starred review, Booklist called the book a “quietly powerful love story” with “superb character development and great emotional depth.” (Williams also won the 2015 Genesis award from the American Christian Fiction Writers Association for her novel “Coming Home to Love.”)
Readers may recognize her: As Preslaysa Edwards (Presley on stage), she co-starred as Cindi in Nickelodeon’s “The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo.” She acted in “The Karate Kid,” “Homeland” and more.
In her writing, she says, she celebrates contemporary Black and Filipino people who seek “love and their happily ever after,” people “who’ve suffered seasons of loss and found restoration, new strength, and a healing of their broken hearts.”
Details: 6 p.m. Tuesday. The ticket, $15.99, pays for the book. See prince-books.com and preslaysa.com. (July 31, she’ll teach a Muse class, “Writing Diversely”; the-muse.org.)
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Behind the story: A 73-year-old repeat offender from Norfolk has gotten six years for driving drunk and rear-ending, at 50 mph, the stopped car of a Beach couple on Feb. 7, 2020. As The Pilot reported Monday, the couple were Kathy Jackson, a Virginia Wesleyan professor, and her husband, author Joe Jackson.
Her internal injuries were critical, and doctors told the two that most people don’t survive such “accordion-style” crashes, Joe Jackson previously told a Pilot editor. Jackson — a nationally honored writer of historical nonfiction (“Black Elk,” “Atlantic Fever,” “The Thief at the End of the World”) who was long a Pilot reporter — said the couple were hospitalized through February, with physical therapy into May. His current project was of course delayed: “In some ways, it’s like starting over again.”
That book, “Liberators,” is a narrative history of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars through the eyes of Cuban, American and Filipino individuals, he said in an email. “Each group thought they were the true liberators, and problems arose from this that still resonate in all three countries today.” He tracks how idealism in Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico soured into “bitterness, brutality or the acceptance of brutality as a legitimate tool,” and how the U.S. saw itself as “the World’s Redeemer,” with long consequences.
Jackson’s manuscript deadline was pushed back a year, he said Wednesday. He’ll submit it this summer, with publication expected next year.
Obituary notes: Eric Carle, whose “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” was one of the best-selling children’s books ever, was 91. It sold more than 55 million copies, in more than 70 languages, worldwide. (NYT)
New and recent
“In Search of a Kingdom: Francis Drake, Elizabeth I, and the Perilous Birth of the British Empire” by Laurence Bergreen. (Custom House, $29.99.) How the rule of Elizabeth I and the voyages of Francis Drake — “a superlative navigator with a habit of piracy,” wrote The New York Times — sparked England’s rise as a world power. Colorful, dramatic and timely, though with glitches of time line and some facts.
— Erica Smith, erica.smith@pilotonline.com
