WINNER OF THE 2026 THOMAS E. KENNEDY NOVEL AWARD:

Sel, an eighty-year-old former marine recovering from a broken hip in Shady Shores nursing home deep in the heat of Florida, wants to return to his childhood home in Ohio, but his hip and son are preventing him from going anywhere. Feather, an eighteen-year-old nursing assistant and orphan, longs to escape the nursing home, and go to Minnesota where she dreams of finding her family, but she has no money, no transportation, and lives with an abusive cop who has threatened her if she ever tries to leave. Sel’s focused on the past. Feather’s focused on the future. One motorcycle, one broken hip, and one determined teenager. What could possibly go wrong?

Author: Roger Hart
Hardcover/Paperback: 272 pages
ISBN: 9781972482247

Roger Hart, a former science teacher and marathon runner, has an MFA in creative writing from Minnesota State-Mankato and is the author of two short story collections, Erratics (Texas Review Press) and Mysteries of the Universe (Kallisto Gaia Press). His stories and essays have been published in more than thirty journals and magazines and have been included in several anthologies. His stories have won the Ohio Writer Fiction Contest, the Third Coast Fiction Contest, the Marguerite McGlinn Fiction Contest, the Dogwood Prize, and the On the Premises Fiction Prize. He lives in Montana where he writes under the supervision of his wife and two big dogs. He is fiction editor of the Bear Paw Arts Journal.

 Roger Hart’s Feather and Sel is a love song for our times, a novel about characters searching for past loves, for a better future, and ultimately for family. These characters will stick with you the way the best ones do. Like old friends. Like family.

— Steve Cushman, author of Hopscotch and The Last Time