Author Conversation with Susan Beckham Zurenda and Donna Everhart

About this event

Susan Beckham Zurenda and Donna Everhart discuss Susan's new book, No Way Out but Through. After a long career teaching English to high school teens and community college adults from all backgrounds, along with her own accumulated years and a lifetime of reading literature, Susan Beckham Zurenda thought she was aware of most human circumstances. Until she met and interviewed the woman who inspired her third novel, No Way Out but Through, she was ignorant of the prevalence and potentially devastating consequences of child marriage in the United States. Susan hopes that readers will be captivated by this emotional novel of two women from different generations—one the victim of an abusive teen marriage and the other damaged from her former marriage to an alcoholic husband—who meet under odd circumstances. Through their willingness to be open and vulnerable with each other, both women begin to trust and heal—to believe in themselves—in this novel of the resilience of the human spirit.

Books will be for sale at the event through The Country Bookshop.

Susan Beckham Zurenda taught English for 33 years on the college level and at the high school level to AP students. Her debut novel, Bells for Eli, was the first-place winner for Best First Book—Fiction in the 2021 IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Awards), a Foreword Indie Book Award finalist, and a Winter 2020 Okra Pick by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, along with several other awards. Her second novel, The Girl From the Red Rose Motel, was the recipient of the 2024 Patricia Winn Award in Southern Fiction and first-place winner in the 2024 IPPY Awards for Southeast Fiction, among others. Zurenda has published and won awards for her short fiction, including the South Fiction Prize, twice. Her new novel, No Way Out but Through, was published August 18, 2026. The author lives in Spartanburg, SC. Learn more at susanzurenda.com.

Donna Everhart is the USA Today bestselling author of authentic, vivid Southern fiction, including the Southeastern Library Association Award-winning The Road to Bittersweet, Indie Next Pick and Amazon Book of the Month, The Education of Dixie Dupree, The Forgiving Kind, The Moonshiner’s Daughter, and The Saints of Swallow Hill. Her sixth novel, When the Jessamine Grows, an Amazon Top Ten Book of the Month, released in 2024 and her most recent novel, Women of a Promiscuous Nature was published this year. Born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, she now lives with her husband in the small town of Dunn, North Carolina where she is currently working on her next novel. She’s a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network, Historical Novel Society, and is the spokesperson for the MaryJanesFarm Book Club.