Major Works
- Flying Shoes (2014) (fiction)
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The Southern I. Q. Quiz Book (2003)
- The South: A Treasury of Art and Literature
- Yellow Dogs, Hushpuppies, and Bluetick Hounds (1996)
Biography
Lisa N. Howorth, born in Washington, D.C., published her first work of fiction, Flying Shoes, at age sixty-three. She and her husband Richard Howorth own Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, which they opened in 1979. The bookstore was named Book Store of the Year in 2013 by Publishers Weekly.
Lisa Howorth previously worked as a reference librarian and art historian at the University of Mississippi where she earned a master’s degree in art history. Howorth and her husband have three children.
Howorth’s novel Flying Shoes is rooted in a very personal subject. In 1966 Lisa Howorth’s stepbrother was attacked and killed near the family’s home in Bethesda, Maryland. The murder made the front page of The Washington Post and the case has never been solved.
In Flying Shoes, a sister (Mary Byrd Thornton) gets a phone call thirty years after her brother is murdered because police have a new lead in the investigation. They want her to come back home to a small Mississippi town to assist. However, rather than being a murder mystery, Flying Shoes is the story of what happens to those left behind when a tragedy strikes. The novel delves into the lives of the characters and the challenges life hands them.
Howorth was awarded the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1996 and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 2007. She has written for Garden and Gun magazine and the Oxford American.
Related Websites
- Lisa Howorth Signs Flying Shoes
- Lisa Howorth, of D.C. and Mississippi, revisits an old crime in “Flying Shoes”. Washington Post, June 19, 2014
- Articles by Lisa Howorth in the Oxford American
- Square Books’ Lisa Howorth’s Fiction Debut. Publishers Weekly, March 28, 2014
- Review and Interview with Lisa Howorth. Deep South Magazine
- A history of Square Books