Announcements

      For her nine years of research bringing back to life and thus preserving the vivid 1850s African American history of her own farm, and the remarkable life of Elizabeth Burton, its free Black owner 165 years before, author Barbara Lockhart has been awarded Underground Railroad Free Press's 2022 Prize for Preservation, the highest honor bestowed in the international Underground Railroad community. Lockhart’s research resulted in her multiple-awarded book, Elizabeth’s Field: Of Freedom and Bondage on Harriet Tubman's Eastern Shore (Secant Publishing, 2020). Lockhart’s and Burton’s farm is located in Dorchester County, Maryland, birthplace of Harriet Tubman, who...

  On Thursday, Sept. 29, Shore History will host British author Margaret Rice to speak about and sign “The Henry Bagwell Story.” The 220-page book is the first biography of an influential English settler on the Eastern Shore in the early 17th century. “My own journey with Henry’s story began 10 years ago,” Rice said. “Looking through my research on my family line, the Chappell family of Exeter, I noticed the name David Bagwell, a marriage to Joan Chappell, birth of their children, including a Henry Bagwell, christened on Oct. 29, 1589. “This led to amazing discoveries, which took me...

When science fiction author Paul Briggs started writing The Locksmith Trilogy ten years ago, he’d never even heard the word “Covid.” The notion of a global pandemic wiping out most of the people on earth was a plot device, and little more. World events caught up to the author’s imagination. On July 4, when the final volume of Briggs’s trilogy, Locksmith’s War, is released, his exploration of how some precocious teens battle the threatened extinction of humanity by a global pandemic will come to a satisfying but haunting conclusion. Instead of inventing mRNA vaccines in their basement to save humankind,...

Three Secant books have been named IPPY Award winners in this year’s international competition. The annual Independent Book Publishers Awards are open to presses and authors worldwide who are publishing for an English-speaking audience. Entrants include both large and small indies as well as university and foundation presses – which makes a very high hurdle indeed. Kudos to all of the following Secant books, published in 2021, for their awards: - Dragged into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult, by Tony Russo. Silver Medalist: True Crime. - The Henry Bagwell Story: English Adventurer, Virginia...

CHINCOTEAGUE, VA -- The future of humanity hinges on a young professor of environmental science, and her ability to outwit a mysterious Wallops Island institute funding her research, in a suspenseful new science fiction novel authored by a husband-and-wife writing team from Reston, Virginia. There’s an ever more head-spinning twist in the futuristic plot. There are two versions of the heroine who exist in parallel timelines. They will need to work together if an Ark-like spaceship carrying a few dozen refugees from Earth is able to escape the deadly gravity well of Jupiter and find safe harbor elsewhere. When Earth...