A lyrical, high-stakes romance thriller inspired by The Great Gatsby
A Summer for Moths is the ballad of Booth Baker, working musician and songwriter hiding out in the guise of a handyman and terrorized by the death in high school that forced him to flee his hometown.
When Booth receives the call from his estranged brother with a summer job offer helping maintain rental properties in Connecticut, he’s thrust into the secret world of the “Gold Coast.” There he meets Abby Evers – beautiful, transfixing, and haunted by her own demons. His desire brings him, moth-like, closer to the flames. Soon, Booth is caught in a web woven much tighter than he could’ve imagined. And when he discovers the truth behind Abby’s husband and his business partners’ dealings, he’s forced to place everything on the line: the chance to reconcile his past, his and Abby’s life in the present, and their chance at a future together.
Henry Rivers is the not-so-secret pen name of children’s author and illustrator J.R. Potter best known for his award-winning supernatural series Thomas Creeper that follows the adventures of a mortician’s apprentice turned detective for the dead. His graphic novel work has been published by Image Comics, and in 2024 he received the Denis Diderot Emerging Artist Award to spend two weeks as writer-in-residence at Chateau Orquevaux in France.
Passionate about literacy and sharing wonder, Potter was recently hired by Heinemann Publishing, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, to create stories about empathy to be used in schools across the country. As a working musician and songwriter by day (and night), he loves to play at the intersection of words and music. A Summer for Moths is the opportunity to combine those two loves in a synesthetic experience that will mix live readings with live music.
You can follow his work on Instagram at @allbooksbuildbridges and on the web at www.jrpotterbooks.com.
Each citizen must contribute to society.
If a citizen fails to find a suitable objective, one will be assigned.
Seventeen-year-old Astra Fairwood has spent her life in the Canopy Complex – a glittering city in the clouds where Assembly members live free from disease and the telltale signs of aging. Far away, in the Donor Zone, a hidden population exists solely to supply the blood plasma that allows the Assembly to thrive.
As the daughter of the Chief Enforcer, Astra has never questioned the system. Why would she? Her future is secure – a life of parties and privilege.
Until everything is taken from her.
Cast out of the Canopy and condemned to the Donor Zone, Astra is forced into the very world she was raised to fear. The Founder claims the Zone provides a haven for society’s worst – the criminals, the lawless, the expendable. But the truth is far more dangerous than she imagined. When Astra meets a girl in the Zone who challenges everything she thought she wanted, she begins to question not only the Assembly but the future that was chosen for her as well.
With tensions rising and the people she loves most in danger, Astra must soon decide who the real monsters are – and how far she’s willing to go to stop them.
Tara Crowe spent her childhood with her nose buried in a book and loves all types of fiction, from historical epics to futuristic dystopia, devouring anything that transports her to another world.
After university, she spent a decade in publishing sales at The Guardian and New Scientist before moving into early years education, where she taught phonics using storytelling, puppets, and a fair amount of enthusiastic (if questionable) singing.
More recently, Tara worked at Ingenious, a company making collagen supplements. She was fascinated by the increasingly clever ways science can trick our bodies into looking and feeling younger, and the inspiration for her novel Little Mice came from a news segment about young blood plasma being used to rejuvenate older people — a concept she found both intriguing and unsettling. The idea lingered: What happens when youth itself becomes a commodity?
Little Mice is Tara’s debut novel, and she is currently working on a sequel. She lives in South London with her husband, teenage children, an adventurous cat, and a spectacularly lazy dog.
A STORY FOR SHILOH
A SUMMER FOR MOTHS
BROKEN BINARIES
GORE, LUST AND KIN
WHAT WAS FORBIDDEN
A STORY FOR SHILOH
A SUMMER FOR MOTHS
BROKEN BINARIES
GORE, LUST AND KIN
LEARNED FOOLS
MENACE BETWEEN
SEEING THE ELEPHANT
TABLOID YOUTH
THE DEPTFORD TERRORS
THE MILLENNIUM BUG
WHAT WAS FORBIDDEN
LEO & THE CHESS GAME OF ASHOKA
LITTLE MICE
THE GROVE OF IMPOSSIBLE THINGS
THE FIVERS
FAKE
LEO & THE CHESS GAME OF ASHOKA
LITTLE MICE
MULBERRY SEEDS – A NOVELLA
PARABLE OF THE PLASTIC EATERS
THE FIVERS
THE GROVE OF IMPOSSIBLE THINGS
THE HAM OF GOD
THE TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS OF JOSEPHINE JACKSON
TO FRANKIE, FROM WONDER
WAXING ARCADIA
We are thrilled to have Faith Shearin as the judge of the 2025 YA/MG Fiction Category. Faith’s novel Lost River, 1918 won the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize in 2021 and My Sister Lives in the Sea is forthcoming. She is also an acclaimed poet.
Faith’s seven books of poetry include: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), Telling the Bees (SFA University Press), Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize), Darwin’s Daughter (SFA University Press), and Lost Language (Press 53). Her poems have been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry. She has received awards from Yaddo, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her essays and short stories have won prizes from, and have appeared in: The Sun, New Ohio Review, The Missouri Review, The Florida Review, and Literal Latte, among others.
