By Nanette Wiser
SAN FRANCISCO BEAT Do you know Peter Kageyama? Peter is an author and urbanist in St. Pete who writes and speaks about emotional engagement with our places. For over a decade now he has been making the case for why it is a good thing for more people to fall in love with their places. Since publication of the first book, For the Love of Cities in 2011, Peter has given hundreds of presentations and has traveled all over the US and around the world as the so-called “Pied Piper of City Love.” Peter’s first fiction novel, “Hunters Point,” is historical fiction, set in San Francisco in 1958 and debuts 1/17, published by St. Petersburg Press. Characters are based on his own inter-racial Japanese American parents and interactions with THE Jimmy Stewart. Booklife says of the novel: “The twisty case that follows reads as a love letter to Cool Gray City and its neighborhoods and people, exemplifying the message of Kageyama’s previous books about loving where you live. The striking cover image, hand-drawn illustrations, and Kageyama’s own sharply evocative prose whisk readers away to the lights and shadows of the city at mid-century, from Navy Yards to North Beach’s beatniks, a term Kageyama points out, in an endnote, was defined in ‘58 by legendary S.F. newsman Herb Caen. With colorful representations of Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Dorothea Lange, and many others, we experience a city where people live, write, dream, connect and – this is a crime novel, after all – scheme.” www.peterkageyama.com
ROSEWOOD REMEMBERED Shana Smith’s new novel is riveting. Smith’s novel,” Islands of Cedars,” remembers Rosewood, Florida, a thriving African American community in the Jim Crow South. The community was torched on January 1, 1923, by the infamous spark of one white woman’s lie. Terrorized families were left homeless and on the run. Six innocent victims dead and untold gallons of blood and tears were left in the wake of the week-long racist rampage that followed. Exactly one hundred years later in January 2023, another spark has begun to burn – a spark of hope. Here in the still-wild heart of remote northwest Florida, race and ecology intersect in the small Gulf Coast town of Cedar Key, where past, present, and future converge. With hundreds of souls left without a resting place in both Rosewood and Cedar Key, the first victim of the Rosewood massacre, Sam Carter, is determined to find a way Home with help from the Native ancestors. Meanwhile, three descendants – Sam’s great-grandson, the great-great-granddaughter of Seminole Indian matriarch Polly Emateloye Parker, and the son of the leader of a local KKK chapter – form an unlikely alliance as they learn to open their hearts and minds to increasing signals from ghosts of the past. By heeding nature, spirit, and their own sense of instinctive connection, they work together to begin to change the patterns of history.
