HERMISTON — Former Hermiston resident Karen Spears Zacharias is featured during an evening with the author on Thursday, April 3, 6:30 p.m. at The Next Chapter Bookstore, 1000 S. Highway 395, Suite C, in Hermiston.

The award-winning author is in town to promote her new book, “The Devil’s Pulpit & Other Mostly True Scottish Misadventures” (Mercer University Press, March 2025), a collection of poems and short stories co-authored with E.J. Wade. The event comes on the heels of being presented a Weatherford Award for Fiction for her novel, “No Perfect Mothers,” during the Appalachian Studies Association Conference, held March 20 at Tennessee Tech University.

She shares this year’s award with Taylor Brown, author of “Rednecks: A Novel” (St. Martin’s Press). Zacharias also won a Weatherford Award in 2014 for her debut novel, “Mother of Rain.”

According to a press release, “No Perfect Mothers” explores characters, historical and imagined, who were parties to the 1927 Buck v. Bell U.S. Supreme Court case. When she became pregnant after being sexually assaulted, Carrie Buck’s foster parents had her fraudulently committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, where she underwent forced sterilization.

Zacharias’ latest publication, “The Devil’s Pulpit & Other Mostly True Scottish Misadventures” (Mercer University Press, March 2025), was co-authored with poet E.J. Wade. The publisher describes it as “part travelogue, part memoir, part poetry, and in outlandish Scottish storytelling tradition, a wee bit of winging it.”

Both with roots in Appalachia, the two women first “met” while enrolled in an online graduate program for Appalachian Studies through Shepherd University. They further forged their friendship while studying abroad at the University of the West of Scotland.

For questions about the author event, search Facebook via bit.ly/3kEDobQ or call The Next Chapter at 541-667-7080. For more information about Zacharias and her books, visit www.karenzach.com.