WHIPPOORWILL SING by KHRISTEENA LUTE

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In Whippoorwill Sing, college-dropout Atlas faces the daunting task of saving the family home in Willow Creek, a rundown Appalachian town. There, she finds work in a museum housed in a former sanatorium. Atlas’s life becomes evermore complicated when she must face the ghosts hiding in the family tree in order to ensure that it has a future. Just as so often in our own lives, Lute’s masterfully written second novel, Whippoorwill Sing, leaves us chasing the promise of forthcoming destiny, all while hoping that we’re informed by the truth of the past. 

Hardback ISBN-13: 978-1-961609-06-8

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-961609-07-5

Khristeena Lute is the author of Finding Grace & Grit (2021), a novel that received high praise from literary scholars for its well-researched details focusing on real-life author Grace King (1852-1932), and Lute's reflective and tumultuous contemporary narrator and academic Meredith Mandin and her veteran husband who is searching for himself after serving in the war in Afghanistan. Lute is a writer and English professor currently residing in upstate New York, where she spends as much of her time outdoors as possible—running, hiking, and camping—or following whatever projects or topics interest her that week. Lute's second novel, Whippoorwill Sing in the genre of Appalachian Gothic, shows the author's talent for capturing her own roots. 

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Khristeena Lute grew up in Scioto County, Ohio, right on the Ohio River. She attended Ohio University Southern in nearby Ironton and completed a degree in English and History in 2004 before moving to Yuma, Arizona to teach junior high school. Not long after, the Army moved her small family to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, leading to her completing her second masters degree at Austin Peay State University. 

She completed her Ph.D. in 2016 from Middle Tennessee State University and is currently an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Reading and Writing at SUNY Adirondack in upstate New York. She has received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Scholarship and Creative Activity and the SUNY Adirondack President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Other recent publications include her debut novel, Finding Grace and Grit (2021); “Katrina Trask: The Gilded Age of Philanthropy” (2023); and “ReConnecting the Centers” (2025).

 Khristeena lives near Saratoga Springs, New York, just outside of the Adirondack State Park, with her husband and two teenage children. She enjoys running, hiking, yoga, and playing her banjo but maintains that she is terrible at all of them. 

New Orleans author Grace King’s childhood turns from Civil War era refinement to navigating the bayous with her family on a flatboat and then emerging to a different life in New Orleans after the war. In the present day, Meredith Mandin becomes fascinated by the life of Grace King after her husband returns from the war in Afghanistan, and they begin a new direction for their family. In her debut novel, Finding Grace and Grit (May 2021), Khristeena Lute shows how Meredith and Grace risk poverty and social suicide as they carve daringly different futures than the ones society had prescribed.

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