Dahlonega
Literary Festival
An Annual Celebration of Readers, Writers, and Books
Meagan Lucas
Meagan Lucas is the author of the award-winning novel Songbirds and Stray Dogs (Main Street Rag Press, 2019) and the short story collection Here in the Dark (Shotgun Honey, 2023). Meagan has published over 30 short stories and essays in journals like The Santa Fe Writers' Project, Still: The Journal, MonkeyBicycle, Cowboy Jamboree, BULL, Pithead Chapel, and others. She is Pushcart, Best of the Net, Derringer, and Canadian Crime Writer's Award of Excellence nominated and won the 2017 Scythe Prize for Fiction. Her novel Songbirds and Stray Dogs was chosen to represent North Carolina in the Library of Congress 2022 Route 1 Reads program. Meagan teaches in the Professional Writing Program at Robert Morris University. She is the Editor in Chief of Reckoning Review. Born and raised on a small island in Northern Ontario, she now lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
Learn more at meaganlucas.com.
Here in the Dark
Here in the Dark, the first collection from award-winning author Meagan Lucas, is a gritty genre-blending wallop of short stories, set mostly in Southern Appalachia, that explore the female experience of lawlessness. In the tradition of Dorothy Allison and Bonnie Jo Campbell, Lucas tackles, with unsettling honesty, poverty, addiction, motherhood, and social justice in an increasingly troubled cultural climate. These are character-driven stories about crime, but less a who-done-it mystery and more a meditation on how the vulnerable navigate a world devoid of true justice. Unflinching in its gaze, Here in the Dark is an ambitious collection from a bold and empathetic storyteller.
