Sandra Jackson-Opoku’s debut cozy mystery, Savvy Summers and the Sweet Potato Crimes won the Malice Minotaur Award for First Traditional Mystery. It is a Library Reads Top 10 Pick, a Woman’s World Book Club selection, and Edgar Award nominee. Sisters in Crime president and Cuban American culinary cozy mystery novelist, Raquel Reyes lauds it as a work of “charm, cadence, and culture.” In a moderated conversation, Jackson-Opoku will discuss her transition from literary to mystery novels, conventions of the culinary cozy genre (and why she breaks some of those rules), and how she weaves together food, culture, and crime writing in a delectable mix.

About the Author: Sandra Jackson-Opoku is the author of the award-winning novel, The River Where Blood is Born and Hot Johnny and the Women Who Loved Him, an Essence Magazine Bestseller in Hardcover Fiction. She also coedited the anthology Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks. Her fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic works are widely published and produced in Adi Magazine, Midnight & Indigo, Aunt Chloe, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, New Daughters of Africa, Obsidian, Another Chicago Magazine, storySouth, Lifeline Theatre, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and others. Professional recognition includes a Plentitudes Journal Prize, the Hearst Foundation James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell Arts, a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, an American Library Association Black Caucus Award, a City of Chicago Esteemed Artist Award, the Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award, a Globe Soup Story Award, the Joan Perry Barnes Fellow in Crime Writing at Storyknife Writers Retreat and a Pushcart Prize nomination.

Presented by Schlow Centre Region Library in partnership with the Nittany Valley Writers Network. 

This program is sponsored in memory of Rus Scheuren.

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