The Motel of the Stars

* Focus on Southern venues for reviews and coverage, including a pitch to Delta Magazine, and public radio in the South * Author tour planned in South and Midwest to include the Virginia Book Festival and Oxford Conference for the Book * Will submit to all qualifying book prizes * Total season's marketing budget of $18,000; individual book budget of $3,000 * Newsletter and catalog feature mailed to contacts on Sarabande database as well as many contacts as McElmurray provides * 2,000 postcards mailed to MFA programs, bookstores, and libraries as well as many contacts as McElmurray provides

A luminous second novel from prize-winning Appalachian author is the selection for the 2007 Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature.The Motel of the Stars is a novel set in Kentucky and North Carolina on the eve of the 1997 anniversary of the Harmonic Convergence, a mystical alignment of planets and a portending of universal peace first celebrated in 1987. Part satire of New Age philosophy and part commentary on a modern, fear-based era, the novel is the story of Jason Sanderson and Lory Llewellyn, who travel to the 1997 Anniversary Gathering at the foot of Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina. Both characters have for ten years mourned the loss of Sam Sanderson, Jason’s son and Lory’s lover, and both must emerge from grief into a new age of possibility and hope. Karen Salyer McElmurray is the author of Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, described by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as “a moving meditation on loss and memory and the rendering of truth and story.” The book was the recipient of the 2003 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book. McElmurray’s debut novel, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, was winner of the 2001 Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the North Carolina Arts Council. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she is an assistant professor in creative writing at Georgia College and State University; she is also the creative nonfiction editor for Arts and Letters.