GAMBIER – The Kenyon College Bookstore will host local author and Kenyon alumna Jamie Lyn Smith as its first book event author this spring. On Tuesday, April 12, at 4:30 p.m. Smith will discuss her short story collection, "Township," in conversation with the Kenyon Review’s Elizabeth Dark.
Set in a fictionalized version of Knox County, "Township" explores a rotating cast of characters who call central Ohio home. Characters weave in and out of stories in the collection: a beleaguered county sheriff whose convict brother returns home for a fresh start after committing horrible crimes; a deeply religious high school boy who struggles to balance faith and burgeoning maturity after inadvertently winning the admiration of the cool crowd; Columbus transplants trying to piece together their marriage and a new life while launching a farm-to-table restaurant in a rapidly gentrifying village; three adults who take a boy and his pet fawn under wing, a bond that is tested when circumstances swirl out of control.
Mark Tuel, Kenyon College Bookstore trade book associate, said, “Jamie Lyn’s book has been on our shelves since midwinter and has been selling steadily. It’s made my reading list, and I look forward to learning more about it at the event.”
"Township" has received accolades from highly regarded authors. David Lynn ("Children of God," editor emeritus of the Kenyon Review) said the stories are “supple, deeply rooted in place and astonishing in their bite and wit.”
Appalachian author Alison Stine ("Trashlands," "Road Out of Winter") described the book as “compulsively readable, gorgeously rendered. Jamie Lyn Smith’s stories shine with the broken-hearted, the wise, the rural and the real.”
Pulitzer-Prize nominee Lee Martin ("The Bright Forever," "Gone the Hard Road," "Yours, Jean") said, “I admire the clear-eyed portrayals of lives lived on the edge – lives that are sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes a little bit of both, but always glorious in the very human tale they have to tell.”
Smith said, “I just wanted to write literary fiction about life in rural America that was also funny, even though the book is a little rough on pet llamas and men who make lousy choices. But without people making catastrophic decisions, I’d have no book.”
A Centerburg native and Kenyon grad, Smith earned her MFA from Ohio State University, where a full scholarship to the writing program gave her the time and resources to write early drafts of the stories in "Township." She is fiction editor at BreakBread Magazine and a consulting editor for the Kenyon Review. She is currently finishing up "Hometown," a novel about millennial crises, culture wars and the rise of white nationalism in the rural Midwest, for which she received a 2020 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.
"Township" is available for purchase at the Kenyon Bookstore and all places books are sold. Smith will sign copies after the author event. This event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Kenyon College Bookstore at shopkenyon.com/contact-us or 740-427-5652.
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