Boo Trundle is a writer, artist, and performer whose work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and NPR’s The Moth. She has released three albums of original music with Big Deal Records. She lives in New Jersey. The Daughter Ship is her first novel.

In the novel, Katherine is an attentive mother to her teenagers, comfortably married to her strapping provider of a husband, but who nonetheless longs to overcome her dark thoughts and intermittent fears of sexual intimacy.

This brisk, mesmerizing version of her life is told in alternating short chapters by Truitt, Star, and Smooshed Bug—her inner children.

Several of her female ancestors, Confederate widows and their daughters, who’ve imposed a legacy of racism and damage on her bloodline, also join the telling.

The assembled ghosts and contenders for Katherine’s ear are gathered in a rusting WWII submarine off the coast of Virginia Beach where the truth of her life is, quite literally, submerged.

Will they surface with it?

Will they protect her from it, or deliver it to her?

This unforgettable chorus of charming selves, battling over Katherine’s wellbeing, is unified by their hope for her future, as they collaborate to shape a personal narrative like no other we’ve experienced in fiction.

Author photo: Nina Subin

Born in New Orleans and raised within smelling distance of the Mississippi River, Lee Barber is a songwriter and visual artist and former front man for the band, The Barbers. When asked to describe his music, he might call it “Zen blues.”

Still, the Louisiana native, currently living in Austin, TX, roots his music in subtle and fundamental ways: it’s modern, intimate and personal.

His albums include Thief and Rescue and The Missing Pages.

Multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter Rhonda Richmond captures the sounds of her native Mississippi in her music which is steeped in the blues and jazz with a healthy dose of R&B and country. Her releases include Oshogbo Town, and the CD, Rhythm and Strings, which features Cassandra Wilson and Alvin Youngblood Hart.

Her song, “Tallahatchie Waters,” appears in the HBO film, Prom Night in Mississippi.

Richmond plays keyboards and contributes vocals to her composition, “Road So Clear” on Cassandra Wilson’s, Belly of the Sun CD. (Mississippi native Olu Dara adds trumpet).

According to Richmond’s website, the singer-songwriter “looks forward to recording new works which includes music inspired by Brazilian poet, Assuncão de Maria, written during her stay in Brazil.”