2026 Festival Gala

Festival Featured Authors

Kate Quinn is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction. A native of Southern California, she attended Boston University, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in classical voice. A lifelong history buff, she has written four novels in the Empress of Rome Saga and two books set in the Italian Renaissance before turning to the 20th century with The Alice Network, The Huntress, The Rose Code, The Diamond Eye, and The Briar Club. The Astral Library is her first foray into magic realism. She and her husband now live in Maryland with their rescue dogs.

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Kristy Woodson Harvey is the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of a dozen novels including Beach House Rules and The Peachtree Bluff Series. A Happier Life is in development for film with MGM/Amazon, The Summer of Songbirds is in development for television with Hulu, and many of her other projects are in various stages of option or development for film and television. Her work has received numerous accolades, including Good Morning America’s Buzz Pick, Southern Living’s Most Anticipated Reads, Katie Couric’s Featured Books, and Joanna Garcia Swisher’s The Happy Place Reads. Kristy is the winner of the Lucy Bramlette Patterson Award for Excellence in Creative Writing and a finalist for the Southern Book Prize.

A Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate with Honors of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s school of journalism, her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Southern Living, Parade, Traditional Home, USA Today, and many more. She also holds a master’s in English from East Carolina University, with a concentration in multicultural and transnational literature.
 

Kristy is the co-creator and cohost of the hit weekly web show and podcast Friends & Fiction with fellow New York Times Bestselling authors Mary Kay Andrews, Kristin Harmel, and Patti Callahan Henry, which boasts more than three hundred thousand members. She is also the co-founder of the award-winning interiors site Design Chic, with her mom, Beth Woodson.
 

She lives on the North Carolina coast—in a town quite a bit like Sea Oat Shores!—with her husband; son; and dog, Salt, where she is (always!) working on her next novel.
 

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CLAIRE COOK wrote her first book in her minivan at 45. At 50, she walked the red carpet at the Hollywood premiere of Must Love Dogs, starring Diane Lane and John Cusack, which is now an 8-book series. Claire is the New York Times, USA Today and international bestselling author of 25 fun and inspiring books for 40-to-forever women, which have been translated into 14 languages. The overarching theme of her writing and her life is that it’s never too late to shine on.

The Today Show featured Claire as a Today’s Woman. The Times-Picayune said, "The exuberant and charming Claire Cook is one of the sassiest and funniest creators of contemporary women’s fiction.” She has been a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor as well as the Beach Read Festival fiction and grand prize winner. After many years living in a beach town between Boston and Cape Cod, Claire and her husband now live on St. Simons Island, where her new book series, Bonus Time, is set. Find out more at ClaireCook.com.
 

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Ashley Elston worked for many years as a wedding photographer before turning her hand to writing. First Lie Wins, her adult debut and a Reese’s Book Club pick, was a number one New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than thirty languages. Anatomy of an Alibi is her second adult novel.

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Mary Alice Monroe is the New York Times bestselling author of 30 books for adults

and children. Her newest title is Where the Rivers Merge, a USA Today bestseller and a

top selection among book clubs.

Mary Alice has earned numerous accolades and awards including induction into the

South Carolina Academy of Authors’ Hall of Fame; South Carolina Center for the Book

Award for Writing; the South Carolina Award for Literary Excellence; the SW Florida

Author of Distinction Award; the RT Lifetime Achievement Award; the International Book

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Award for Green Fiction; the Henry Bergh Award for Children’s Fiction; and her novel A

Lowcountry Christmas won the prestigious Southern Prize for Fiction. Mary Alice is also

the co-founder of the popular weekly web show and podcast Friends & Fiction.

The Beach House is a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, starring Andie McDowell. Several

of her novels are optioned for film.

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Mary Alice has championed the fragility of the earth’s wild habitat. The coastal southern

landscape in particular is a strong and important focus of many of her novels. For her

writing, Monroe immerses herself in academic research, works with wildlife experts, and

does hands-on volunteering with animals, then crafts captivating stories that identify

important parallels between nature and human nature. Sea turtles, bottlenose dolphins, monarch butterflies, raptors, and shorebirds are among the species she has worked with and woven into her novels.

Mary Alice is also an active conservationist and serves on several boards including the

South Carolina Aquarium board emeritus, the Pat Conroy Literary Center Honorary

Board, and the Leatherback Trust, for which she received the Leatherback Trust

Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022. 

Mary Alice splits her time between her home on the South Carolina coast and her home

in the North Carolina mountains. When she’s not writing a novel, she is with her family

or busy working with wildlife somewhere in the world.

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Philipp Meyer is the author of two novels, The Son and American Rust. The Son was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; both novels have been translated into thirty languages and adapted into television shows.  

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Meyer grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Baltimore, MD and dropped out of high school. He eventually graduated from Cornell University and the University of Texas. He’s worked as an ambulance driver and construction worker; he was also a derivatives trader at a Swiss investment bank. 

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In 2017, he was made a chevalier (knight) in the French Government’s Order of Arts and Letters. His third novel, The City, will be published in 2027. A fourth novel (about the life of stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius) will be published in 2028.  

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Kevin Powers was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. Since publishing his first novel in 2012, his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Prix littéraire du Monde prix étranger, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, among other recognitions. He was a James A. Michener Fellow in Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin from 2009-2012 and later held a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. A U.S. Army veteran of the war in Iraq, Kevin now lives on Florida’s First Coast with his family.