Our guest this week is Hope Gibbs (Where The Grass Grows Blue, Red Adept, May 2023). Hope looked around as her kids left for college and thought what now? The result is this southern women’s fiction/contemporary romance mash-up that’s won 13 major writing awards and been licensed by Blackstone for an audiobook release. We discuss how a chapter her editor had her take out because it didn’t advance the story later became the perfect epilogue, how she joined WFWA and immediately binge watched every webinars we offered to learn what she didn’t know, and how, after years of saying no to requests from her five kids, her approach to marketing her debut was to say yes to every offer that came her way.

Hope Gibbs grew up in rural Scottsville, Kentucky. As the daughter of an English teacher, she was raised to value the importance of good storytelling from an early age. Today, she’s an avid reader of women’s fiction. Drawn to multi-generational family sagas, relationship issues, and the complexities of being a woman, she translates those themes into her own writing. A mother of five, she loves playing tennis, pickleball, singing karaoke, and curling up on her favorite chair with a book. She holds a B.A. from Western Kentucky University and is a member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, the Women’s National Book Association, a tour guide for Bookish Road Trip, and the co-host of the Authors Talking Bookish Podcast.

To learn more about Hope, click here.