Finalist of the 2019 W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections
Raleigh native Heather Newton grew up with a mother, Suzanne Newton, who was (is) an author of young adult novels. With a writer for a mother, Heather began creating books of her own as soon as she was old enough to hold a stapler. She went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh planning to major in writing, but once there discovered a love for History, and also discovered she was too young to have anything interesting to write about. She majored in History and then did what liberal arts majors do when they can’t find a job–she went to law school, at UNC Chapel Hill. She began writing seriously after starting her first legal job in Boston, and hasn’t stopped since. She lives in Asheville, where she practices law, teaches creative writing for UNC Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program, and co-runs the Flatiron Writers Room, a space for all things literary in western NC, which she founded in 2017 with Maggie Marshall. Her husband, daughter, and two fat cats keep her sane.
Heather’s novel Under The Mercy Trees (HarperCollins 2011) won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, was chosen by the Women’s National Book Association as a Great Group Reads Selection and by the Southern Independent Bookstore Alliance as an Okra Pick (“great southern fiction fresh off the vine”), and was long-listed for the 2012 SIBA Book Award and the American Library Association’s Over The Rainbow project. Her short prose has appeared in Enchanted Conversation Magazine, The Drum, Dirty Spoon and elsewhere. The stories in her McMullen Circle short story collection are set in a fictionalized Tallulah Falls, Georgia, where her husband spent his childhood and saw Karl Wallenda walk a tightrope across Tallulah Gorge.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Heather Newton’s short story collection McMullen’s Circle in the fall of 2021.
