Stories with Southern roots.

I write contemporary women's fiction about complicated women, tangled families, old places, second chances, and all the beautiful mess that happens in between.

But the first story I'm bringing into the world is a little more personal.

I started writing this series more than ten years ago, mostly because a few good friends kept telling me I should.

One of those friends believed in it—and in me—long before there was a Dollie Jean pen name, a website, or any real plan for what I might do with the pages piling up on my computer.

I lost her a few years ago.

And for a while, the writing stopped.

Honestly, it felt like my whole world stopped. I couldn't get past the heartbreak long enough to find my way back to the story, much less finish it.

Until one day, it came back.

With a vengeance.

What had once been a story I wanted to finish suddenly felt like a promise I needed to keep. To her, certainly. But somewhere along the way, I realized I'd made that promise to myself, too.

And now, nearly ten years after I first started writing it, I'm standing on the edge of finally sending it out into the world.

It's exciting. It's terrifying. It's a little surreal.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I can almost hear her:

“Get it, girl.”

So I am.

Coming Soon

THE WOMEN OF MO'HATCHIE

The stories we're told.
The stories we uncover.
The stories we choose to write for ourselves.

Before they were family legends, they were just girls trying to become women in a world that had already decided who they were supposed to be.

Across generations of one sprawling Louisiana family, the women of Mo'Hatchie fall in love, lose each other, break rules, keep secrets, survive heartbreak, make spectacular mistakes, laugh at wildly inappropriate moments, and slowly claim something the women before them were rarely given: the right to choose for themselves.

At the heart of it all are sisters Dahli Ree and Honey, raised in a world with very particular ideas about what made a good woman, a good daughter, a good Christian, a good wife, and a respectable family. They begin questioning those rules long before anyone around them is ready for the answers.

Their choices—and the prices they pay for them—will ripple through their family for generations.

Years later, Dahli Ree's granddaughter, Sugar, comes home to Mo'Hatchie believing she's returning to bury the woman who raised her.

She's about to discover how little she knows about the women who made her who she is.

THE TRILOGY

In Sugar's family, everybody has secrets.

Gram just happened to leave hers behind.

Southern women's fiction about family, grief, homecoming, unexpected love, and the stories we inherit from the women who came before us.

Elsabeth Sugar has spent ten years building a life far away from the tiny Louisiana town where she grew up. Then one phone call brings her home.

Her beloved Gram is gone.

Sugar expects grief. She expects a funeral, a house full of relatives, enough food to feed half the parish, and at least a week's worth of unsolicited opinions about everything from her clothes to her unmarried status.

What she doesn't expect is everything Gram left behind.

There are journals filled with pieces of a life Sugar never knew. Family stories that don't quite match the versions she grew up hearing. Questions about the mother who abandoned her. And secrets belonging to the two women who raised her—women Sugar suddenly realizes had entire lives, loves, heartbreaks, and battles long before either of them became Gram and Honey.

The deeper Sugar digs into the past, the more the family she thought she understood begins to change.

So does her future.

Because across the road is Lucah K'Erygan, all grown up and considerably harder to ignore than she remembers. What begins as an unexpected bright spot in the worst week of her life becomes something Sugar hasn't allowed herself to want in a very long time: a reason to stay.

Set among Louisiana back roads, front porches, church pews, family kitchens, old grudges, ridiculous relatives, and enough Southern gossip to qualify as a competitive sport, The Women of Mo'Hatchie is a multigenerational story about mothers and daughters, sisters and lovers, the families we're born into and the ones who raise us—and what happens when women begin questioning the stories they've inherited.

Because coming home isn't always about returning to a place you left.

Sometimes it's about finally understanding what's been waiting there all along.

The first story is coming.

I've waited more than ten years to bring the women of Mo'Hatchie into the world. I'm not giving away all their secrets just yet.

Join me for the first title reveal, cover reveal, sneak peeks, behind-the-scenes stories, and everything leading up to launch.