"Whether it's with a guitar, a pen & piece of
paper or a camera, I just like telling stories."
- STACY DEAN
"Whether it's with a guitar, a pen & piece of
paper or a camera, I just have to tell stories."
- STACY DEAN
"Whether it's with a guitar, a pen & piece of
paper or a camera, I just have to tell stories."
- STACY DEAN
"Whether it's with a guitar, a pen & piece of
paper or a camera, I just have to tell stories."
- STACY DEAN
BOOKS
"The writing is flawless." - WRITER'S DIGEST
COTTONWOOD
In a small Texas town where cotton fields stretch farther than mercy, a boy watches the world he knows begin to crack. His family is already breaking. His mother lost to grief, his father hardened by bitterness, when Esther arrives to work in their home. She brings steadiness, quiet strength, and a way of seeing that unsettles everything the boy has been taught. Esther’s husband, PV, dares to farm his own land, igniting resentment among men who believe some dreams are not meant to be claimed. As whispers turn to threats and the town’s old hatred stirs awake, the boy is forced to confront the violence beneath respectability, and the choices that shape who we become when cruelty is normalized. Cottonwood is a raw, deeply human novel about race, memory, and the slow, painful birth of conscience, told in a voice steeped in the heat, dust, and moral weight of the American South.
HOPE IS A HARD THING
Hope Is a Hard Thing is a collection of quiet, intimate stories about the lives we build, the things we carry, and the moments that change us when no one is watching. These stories live in kitchens after everyone has gone to bed. On empty train platforms. In cheap motels off the interstate. In the sleepless noise of truckstops and the long, slow hours of waiting. They belong to people carrying things they don’t know how to put down yet — widows and drifters, waitresses and working men, daughters who never came back, and lovers who never quite left.
Some of these pieces are fully told stories. Others are fragments. Found moments. Remnants of lives overheard and remembered. Together they form a quiet record of trying, failing, leaving, staying, and learning how to live with the ache of wanting something more.
Hope runs through every page — sometimes stubborn, sometimes fragile, sometimes barely there at all — but always present in the space between what was lost and what might still be waiting.
Spare, tender, and deeply human, Hope Is a Hard Thing is a book for readers who believe the smallest moments often carry the greatest weight.