Photos by Cedric Smith
When Nancy Brandon was born in Atlanta, Georgia, she thought she was home, but after only a few days, her parents took her south and said, “You really live in Hawkinsville.” As her mother edited and wrote columns for the Hawkinsville Dispatch and News, Nancy worked as a paper girl to support her fledgling writing career. Unsuccessful at selling stories to the local newspaper, Nancy eventually self-published Laurie Rides a Horse, which she wrote and illustrated on typing paper bound by three staples. Her grandmother, children’s author Sydney K. Davis, declared the work worthy of a Pulitzer, and that was all Nancy needed to keep writing.
But her subject matter turned to more academic topics as she earned undergraduate and graduate degrees and as she taught college composition in Savannah. After publishing four college writing textbooks, she turned her attention back to writing fiction.
Nancy independently published her first novel, Dunaway’s Crossing, in 2012 and it reached #1 on Amazon’s historical fiction list. The following year it finaled for the Georgia Author of the Year Award. As Nancy was editing Decades, Lake Union Publishing discovered Dunaway’s Crossing, acquired the book and re-released it in 2015. Next came Show Me a Kindness, which she published with Lake Union in 2017.
Drawing on her small-town Georgia roots and her affinity for the past, Nancy writes stories about overcoming obstacles that come from living in the rural South. She still lives in Savannah with her husband and two sons. When she’s not writing, she’s either baking brownies or walking around a nearby lake looking for turtles.