KJ Dell’Antonia was, for years, living in New England and editing Motherlode, a column for the NY Times, but when she decided to write a novel, she drew on her childhood experience in Kansas. The Chicken Sisters is about a stormy, often humorous relationship between siblings who find themselves championing competing fried-chicken restaurants in the little town of Merinac, Kansas, putting their whole family at risk of imploding. When that debut novel came out in 2020 it climbed into the bestseller ranks and was picked by Reese Witherspoon for her influential book club. Now, two years later, KJ is back with a second novel–In Her Boots–which clearly draws on personal experience too. The main character, Rhett, is a fiction writer who has written a bestseller under a pseudonym. Panicked by a broken romance and a tragedy back home at the family farm, Rhett convinces a friend to pose as the author of her new bestseller, only to find that her mother is more impressed with the fake author than herself. How can Rhett prove herself to the distressed mother as she decides to sell the beloved farm? Come hear KJ September 24th, 2022, at the Kansas Book Festival, when she talks about the search for happiness and learning to live authentically in one’s own boots.