Award-winning poet DéLana R. A. Dameron’s debut novel is Redwood Court (The Dial Press)

Redwood Court is a cul-de-sac in the all-Black working-class suburb of Columbia, South Carolina, where young Mika’s grandparents live.

Mika learns important lessons from the people who raise her: her exhausted parents, who work multiple jobs to enable family vacations; her older sister, who in a house filled with Motown would rather listen to Alanis Morrisette and her retired grandparents, children of Jim Crow, who realized their own vision of success when they bought their house on the Court in the 1960s.

Redwood Court is a celebration of ordinary people striving to achieve their own American dreams.

“Redwood Court is storytelling at its best: tender, vivid, and richly complicated.”—Jacqueline Woodson, New York Times bestselling author

Dameron’s debut poetry collection was How God Ends Us. Her second collection is Weary Kingdom.

Ghalia Volt is a slide guitarist/vocalist from Brussels, Belgium now based in New Orleans. Her CD, Mississippi Blend (Ruf Records), debuted at #3 on the Billboard blues charts. The disc was recorded in Coldwater, MS at the Zebra Ranch and features Cody Dickinson, Lightnin’ Malcolm, Cedric Burnside and Watermelon Slim, of nearby Clarksdale, on harmonica.

Her previous CD was Let the Demons Out which rose to #23 on the Living Blues chart.

Volt is a favorite on the European blues festival circuit and a strong touring act stateside with her dynamic one-woman blues rig that includes her playing guitar and drums.

Raised outside Houston, TX by first-generation Korean immigrant parents, Soo was educated at the University of Texas, and grew up listening to the Great American songbook and country radio.

Her releases include 2007’s Little Tiny Secrets; 2009’s Heat Sin Water Sin produced by Gurf Morlix (Lucinda Williams, Ray Wylie Hubbard).

In 2014, When We’re Gone, co-produced with cellist Brian Standefer (Alejandro Escovedo, Terry Allen) placed her firmly in the first rank of songwriters working today.

“In her own words, ‘I guess Asian-American songwriters aren’t that common.  At least, not in Texas.’  Well, songwriting and singing of this caliber aren’t that common anywhere.” – No Depression

Soo spent much of 2023 touring with veteran acclaimed songwriters James McMurtry and Chris Smither.