Exciting Guest Lecture at Stephens College: Author Michelle Anderson to Visit “All That Jazz” Class
Acclaimed author Michelle Anderson will be visiting Stephens College this fall as a guest lecturer in the English and Creative Writing course “All That Jazz: Literature of the 1920s.” Michelle will share her insights and experiences with students on Thursday, August 29th, from 10 a.m. to 12 noon in Dudley 222. All students are welcome.
Michelle Anderson, who lived in Columbia for many years and was a passionate supporter of the arts in our community, is the author of the much-talked-about novel The Flower Sisters. Her journey as a writer, marked by hard work and persistence, is sure to inspire and resonate with our students. Michelle’s close connection to Stephens College, including her tenure as an adjunct faculty member, makes this visit even more special.
The prologue to The Flower Sisters will be available on reserve at the library at the start of the school year for those interested in exploring her work before the lecture.
This event is open to all interested students. Don’t miss the chance to hear from an accomplished author who has made significant contributions to the literary world and our local community!
For more information, please contact Kris Somerville, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing, at ksomerville@stephens.edu.
About Michelle
Michelle Collins Anderson grew up on a registered Angus cattle farm outside of West Plains, Missouri, deep in the Ozarks — a place and a way of life that have shaped her writing. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Missouri with a Bachelor of Journalism degree and spent the next fifteen years as a copywriter in advertising and public relations agencies in St. Louis, Palo Alto, Denver, and Houston before pursuing a freelance writing career. Anderson and her husband Clay returned to Missouri in 1997, where she taught as an adjunct professor at both the University of Missouri and Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, their home for the next thirteen years. In 2010, they moved to Liberty, Missouri, where they lived until 2023. During that time, she graduated with an MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina and taught creative writing to elementary students. The couple has three adult children and recently relocated to St. Louis where they live in a 1907 brick row house in the city with two cats and a rambunctious border collie. The Flower Sisters is Michelle’s first novel.
About “The Flower Sisters”
Daisy Flowers is fifteen in 1978 when her free-spirited mother dumps her in Possum Flats, Missouri. It’s a town that sounds like roadkill and, in Daisy’s eyes, is every bit as dead. Sentenced to spend the summer living with her grandmother, the wry and irreverent town mortician, Daisy draws the line at working for the family business, Flowers Funeral Home. Instead, she maneuvers her way into an internship at the local newspaper where, sorting through the basement archives, she learns of a mysterious tragedy from fifty years earlier…
On a sweltering, terrible night in 1928, an explosion at the local dance hall left dozens of young people dead, shocking and scarring a town that still doesn’t know how or why it happened. Listed among the victims is a name that’s surprisingly familiar to Daisy, revealing an irresistible family connection to this long-ago accident.
Obsessed with investigating the horrors and heroes of that night, Daisy soon discovers Possum Flats holds a multitude of secrets for a small town. And hardly anyone who remembers the tragedy is happy to have some teenaged hippie asking questions about it – not the fire-and-brimstone preacher who found his calling that tragic night; not the fed-up police chief; not the mayor’s widow or his mistress; not even Daisy’s own grandmother, a woman who’s never been afraid to raise eyebrows in the past, whether it’s for something she’s worn, sworn, or done for a living.
Some secrets are guarded by the living, while others are kept by the dead, but as buried truths gradually come into the light, they’ll force a reckoning at last.
Inspired by the true story of the Bond Dance Hall explosion, a tragedy that took place in the author’s hometown of West Plains, Missouri on April 13, 1928.
The cause of the blast has never been determined.
