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Jill Hendrix
Fiction Addiction
864-675-0540
info@fiction-addiction.com
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Book Signing for South Carolina Author Bonnie Stanard 

Greenville, SC, February 17, 2012 - South Carolina author Bonnie Stanard will be signing copies of her debut novel, Kedzie: Saint Helena Island Slave (FairView News, paperback, $16.95), at Fiction Addiction on Thursday, April 12th, from 12-2pm. 

The young girl Kedzie hardly knows she's a slave until she moves from the village to the torrid quarters of Westfall Plantation on Saint Helena Island, South Carolina. Chickens, dogs, cats, and children wander in and out of the slave cabins. People sleep on coarse ticks stuffed with shucks and cook their corn pone over the open fire. Cries and laughter escape from chinks in the walls. This rush of humanity is overworked and underfed, crude, brash, and aggrieved, and Kedzie wants no part of it.

Until Rio arrives. He acts the part of a slave when he has to, but a streak of freedom runs down his back. Just as Kedzie finds Rio, she is moved to the big house to become a table servant. Some secrets are never spoken, such as what happens to her in the dark of night. This leads to the possibility that she will be sold to a trader and driven, barefoot and lonely, to the cane fields of Mississippi. This is the story of how she fights to avoid her fate. 

Bonnie Stanard's poetry and short stories have been published in literary journals such as The Griffin, Taproot Literary Review, Harpur Palate, Slipstream, Eclipse, Barrier Islands Review, The South Carolina Review, and Silver Boomer's 2010 anthology From the Porch Swing. She edited the English monthly magazine Rendez-vous while living in Belgium and was assitant editor of Fanfare while in Richmond. In the early '90s, she published the monthly newspaper FairView News, distributed in Lexington and Aiken Counties, South Carolina. This is her first published novel. She has three adult sons and five grandchildren and lives in Columbia, South Carolina, with her husband Douglas Stanard.