The Bookplate is continuing their Authors & Oysters event series at The Retriever Bar on Wednesday, July 5th at 6pm. All are invited to The Retriever to welcome author Joseph Koper as he discusses his book, The Isaiah Fountain Case.

Koper’s book is the first modern detailed account of the mostly-forgotten story that outraged Talbot County, Maryland a century ago. The Isaiah Fountain Case tells the story of a sensational rape case that convulsed Talbot County and made national headlines early in the 20th century. The story of Isaiah Fountain is told through court documents and hundreds of contemporaneous newspaper articles. Koper’s book documents dubious investigative and judicial actions and raises questions about Isaiah Fountain’s guilt and the Jim Crow legal system that convicted him.

“This rigorous account clearly shows that Isaiah Fountain suffered a fate he didn’t deserve.” -Kirkus Reviews

“The story of Isaiah Fountain is a must read, particularly for anyone seeking to learn more about America’s difficult past. This century-old story was new to me and I am grateful to Joe Koper for this magnificent book.” – Paul Brandus, Dow Jones/MarketWatch and USA Today columnist and White House correspondent, West Wing Reports

“A well-researched tragic story.” – John R. Wennersten, historian and professor emeritus of environmental history, University of Maryland-Eastern Shore

Joe Koper is a “come-here” to Talbot County, Maryland, where he retired with his wife, Jackie, following service in the U.S. Army and a career spent largely in human resources management.

A graduate of Gannon College and George Washington University, Koper has become fascinated with the long and rich history of the county and the Eastern Shore. The Isaiah Fountain Case is his first book.

For more event details contact The Bookplate at 410-778-4167 or [email protected]. This event is free and open to the public and reservations are not required. The next Authors & Oysters event is scheduled for 7/19 with author Gerald Sweeney. All events are held in the back room of The Retriever, located at 337 ½ High Street in Chestertown, Maryland. 

The Bookplate is happily continuing their popular Authors & Oysters event series at The Retriever Bar in 2023. Author Michael Stang was featured in the most recent Authors & Oysters event on May 31st. Next up on Wednesday, June 7th at 6pm, all are invited to The Retriever to welcome local favorite Jamie Kirkpatrick as he discusses his historical novel, “This Salted Soil: The Battle for Tunisia, 1942-1943”.

“This Salted Soil” tells the story of the North African Campaign in World War II; America’s first, but often-overlooked, involvement in the war against Nazi Germany that helped to shape and ultimately secure the Allied victory in that bloody conflict. Using both historical and fictional characters, this is the story of the battle for Tunisia that took place between November, 1942 and May, 1943. The novel also explores two other related themes: Tunisia’s struggle for independence from France and the role of Third World countries in the ideological struggle between East and West in the post-war era.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Tunisia from 1970 to 1972. He was also the Associated Peace Corps Director in Tunisia from 1974 to 1976. Now retired after careers in international service organizations and education, Jamie is a writer and photographer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. For the past seven years, Jamie has written a weekly column for The Chestertown Spy and The Talbot Spy. Two collections of these essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available at The Bookplate. Jamie and his wife Kat Conley have homes in Bethesda and Chestertown.

For more event details contact The Bookplate at 410-778-4167 or [email protected]. This event is free and open to the public and reservations are not required, however the event on 6/14 with Smithsonian curator, Eleanor Harvey, will require reservations to guarantee a seat. Reserve your space by calling the shop at 410-778-4167. All events are held in the back room of The Retriever, located at 337 ½ High Street in Chestertown, Maryland. 

The Bookplate is happily continuing their popular Authors & Oysters event series at The Retriever Bar in 2023. Author Henry Corrigan was featured in the most recent Authors & Oysters event on May 3rd. Next up on Wednesday, May 31st at 6pm, all are invited to The Retriever to welcome author Michael Stang as he discusses his collection of short stories, “The Monster of the Gunpowder River and Other Fabrications”.

Michael A. Stang has written over forty plays, many of which have been produced in the U.S. and Australia. His love of the short story began in grade school and was rekindled during Covid, when this collection was written. Dr. Stang is a retired emergency physician who came to Baltimore for his residency and remained. Besides writing, he enjoys travel, biking, fly-fishing and woodworking. He lives in Baltimore with his wife.

“Michael Stang’s magic-carpet stories fly us beyond the bounds of the real, into a world similar to this one but more magical, more coherent, and much kinder. Take the trip. A visit will do you good.” –William deBuys, Pulitzer finalist and author of The Trail to Kanjiroba

“The stories in The Monster of the Gunpowder River and Other Fabrications are a moving and elegant display of Dr. Stang’s abilities as a chronicler of history, place, character, and the nuances of time on the subjects on which he chooses to turn his knowledgeable gaze—in this case, the surrounds of the Gunpowder River in Baltimore County. The pieces bring to life real symbols, icons, and landmarks filtered through the author’s vivid imagination, at times melancholic and wistful, other times bawdy and outrageous. His tales are a balm for our current, challenging times.” –Dr. Hortense Gerardo, playwright, screenwriter, and Director of the Anthropology, Performance, and Technology (APT) Program at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.

“Behold 7 wonder stories, each structured upon a skeleton of geographic and historic truths, made flesh by their able and tender physician/writer and gifted breath by the pure power of his imagination – together forming a kind of benevolent Golem to snuggle up to each night. Bravo!” –Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, Founder/Director American Visionary Art Museum

For more event details contact The Bookplate at 410-778-4167 or [email protected]. This event is free and open to the public and reservations are not required, however the event on 6/14 with Smithsonian curator, Eleanor Harvey, will require reservations to guarantee a seat. Reserve your space by calling the shop at 410-778-4167. The next Authors & Oysters is scheduled for 6/7 with local favorite, Jamie Kirkpatrick. All events are held in the back room of The Retriever, located at 337 ½ High Street in Chestertown, Maryland. 

The Bookplate is happily continuing their popular Authors & Oysters event series at The Retriever Bar in 2023. Author Edward Ball was featured in the most recent Authors & Oysters event on April 19th. Next up on Wednesday, April 26th at 6pm, all are invited to The Retriever to welcome local author Mary Hardcastle as she discusses her new novel, “Deja Vu”.

“Cory is living out her 20’s in Chicago, haunted by the past. Her anxious mind leads her into a dangerous encounter that sends her back through time to a period she is clueless about – post Revolution and pre-Civil War America. Her determination to return to the 21st Century lands her on a flatboat traveling down the Mississippi River with a rugged young man she barely knows. She hopes to find ancestors in New Orleans and doesn’t realize she is heading for disaster. Despite breathtaking landscapes and the excitement of meeting several historical figures including a young Abe Lincoln, her contemporary views clash with 19th Century ambitions and she experiences first hand the violent and faulty foundation her country is laying. When she discovers that love can erase time and heal tragedy, she is faced with an impossible choice—to stay in a turbulent era when she knows the outcome or return to an America in chaos..”

Mary Hardcastle belongs to a Midwest family of writers, and after a brief stint as an actor in NY and LA, she moved to Baltimore and began writing. She was called to set this novel in her home state of Illinois, land of the Miami, Winnebago, Fox and Sauk, Kickapoo, and Pottawatomie. the Prairie State, Chicago Jazz, and “Land of Lincoln.” She has been recognized through blogs, radio features, and as writer/producer of two indie feature films, but considers her municipal parks job connecting children with nature as the most important for the compassion it builds and wonder it fosters in the next generation. 

“Ms. Hardcastle masterfully crafts a story that is equal parts time-travel fantasy, love story, and history lesson… The story is told with heart and awareness, and the particulars of life in the 1830s are rendered with skill… A trip down the Mississippi on a flatboat hasn’t been told with such rich detail since the writings of Mark Twain. Trust me you’ve never been anywhere like this before.” -Vincent Meis

For more event details contact The Bookplate at 410-778-4167 or [email protected]. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are not required. The next Authors & Oysters event is scheduled for 5/3 with local author, Henry Corrigan. All events are held in the back room of The Retriever, located at 337 ½ High Street in Chestertown, Maryland. 

The Bookplate is happily continuing their popular Authors & Oysters event series at The Retriever Bar in 2023. Author Brooks Yeager was featured in the most recent Authors & Oysters event on March 15th. Next up on Wednesday, April 5th at 6pm, all are invited to The Retriever to welcome back author and cyclist David Goodrich as he discusses his latest book, “On Freedom Road; Bicycle Explorations and Reckonings on The Underground Railroad”.

“The traces of the Underground Railroad hide in plain sight: a great church in Philadelphia; a humble old house backing up to the New Jersey Turnpike; an industrial outbuilding in Ohio. Over the course of four years, David Goodrich rode his bicycle 3,000 miles east of the Mississippi to travel the routes of the Underground Railroad and delve into the history and stories in the places where they happened. He followed the most famous of conductors, Harriet Tubman, from where she was enslaved in Maryland, on the eastern shore, all the way to her family sanctuary at a tiny chapel in Ontario, Canada. On Freedom Road: Bicycle Explorations and Reckonings on the Underground Railroad enables us to see familiar places—New York and Philadelphia, New Orleans and Buffalo—in a very different light: from the vantage point of desperate people seeking to outrun the reach of slavery. Join in this journey to find the heroes and stories, both known and hidden, of the Underground Railroad.”

David Goodrich worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and served as the Director of the UN Global Climate Observing System in Geneva, Switzerland. He retired as head of NOAA’s Climate Observations and Monitoring Program. In addition to his cross-country bicycle trip, he has ridden down the Appalachians and across Montana, South Dakota, France and Spain. His written works include A Hole in the Wind and A Voyage Across an Ancient Ocean. He lives in Maryland.

“On Freedom Road is a vital and accessible text for readers to understand the conditions enslaved people faced when attempting escape.”—Booklist

“Climate scientist Goodrich documents his bike rides along ‘routes of the Underground Railroad’ in this illuminating blend of history and travelog. Throughout, Goodrich reveals how slavery is remembered and misremembered in America, and makes a convincing case that ‘national trauma, like a wound, tends to heal when it’s exposed to air.’ It’s a harrowing yet inspirational ride.” —Publishers Weekly

“A heartfelt reminder of the importance of remembering our past in order to continue to learn from it.”—Kirkus Reviews

For more event details contact The Bookplate at 410-778-4167 or [email protected]. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are not required. The next Authors & Oysters event is scheduled for 4/19 with National Book Award winner, Edward Ball. All events are held in the back room of The Retriever, located at 337 ½ High Street in Chestertown, Maryland. 

The Bookplate is happily continuing their popular Authors & Oysters event series at The Retriever Bar in 2023. Local favorite Rich Gillin was featured in the most recent Authors & Oysters event on February 8th. Next up on Wednesday, March 8th at 6pm, all are invited to The Retriever to hear author Allyson Rice discuss her novel, “The Key to Circus-Mom Highway”.

“On a Tuesday afternoon, Chicago-based sisters Jesse Chasen and Jennifer McMahon receive a phone call notifying them that their birth mother they had no knowledge of has died, leaving behind a significant inheritance. But in order to obtain it, they must follow a detailed road trip she designed for them to get to know her—and that includes finding a brother they never knew existed.

For the next week, this ill-assorted trio treks across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to meet their mother’s old friends, from circus performers to juke joint owners, each of whom delivers a shocking vignette into the life of a young mother traumatized by loss and abuse. Along the way, these three siblings —Jesse, whose fiery exterior disguises a drifting musician stuck in a rut; Jennifer, whose carefully curated family life is threatened by her husband’s infidelity; and Jack, whose enigmatic Jackie, Oh! persona in the New Orleans drag queen scene helps him escape the nightmares of Afghanistan that haunt him at night—must confront their own demons (and at least one alligator). But in chasing the truth about their real mother, they may all just find their second chance.

A story of family trauma and transformation, The Key to Circus-Mom Highway is a profound, often hilarious, reminder that the family you’d never have chosen may turn out to be exactly what you need.”

Allyson Rice is a writer, mixed media artist, and producer currently splitting her time between Los Angeles, CA, and Rehoboth Beach, DE. She’s a graduate of Northwestern University with a Bachelors of Science in Communication. After spending many years as an actress on stage and on television, she left the business and spent the next decade running yoga/meditation retreats, women’s retreats, and creativity retreats around the country. She’s currently at work on her next novel, Normal is Overrated, and her fourth women’s coloring book.

“A road trip takes three siblings through their mother’s eye-opening past in this novel….Although it steps into grim territory, Rice’s tale provides ample comedy….Characters, meanwhile, bond in fun, unexpected ways…This breezy, charming tale incisively shows a family’s bittersweet facets.” — Kirkus Reviews

Winner of the Literary Titan Gold Book Award 2023

For more event details contact The Bookplate at 410-778-4167 or [email protected]. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are not required. The next Authors & Oysters event is scheduled for 3/15 with Brooks Yeager. All events are held in the back room of The Retriever, located at 337 ½ High Street in Chestertown, Maryland. 

The Bookplate is happily continuing their popular Authors & Oysters event series at The Retriever Bar in 2023. “The World Girls”; poets Meredith Davies Hadaway, Erin Murphy, and Amanda Newell were featured in the most recent Authors & Oysters event on December 14th. Now in the new year, on Wednesday, January 11th at 6pm, all are invited to The Retriever to hear author Tom Cousineau present “The Seance of Reading: F. Scott Fitzgerald and his Gatsby”.

Inspired by Mircea Eliade’s commentaries on the Romanian ballad, “The Legend of Master Manole” — in which the master-builder Manole learns that he must bury his wife Ana alive in the walls of the monastery that he is building at Curtea de Arges — Cousineau’s book gathers together guest-lectures presented at various Romanian universities in which the author explored the disguised return of archaic building-rituals in nine “monuments” of twentieth-century century literature, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” James Joyce’s “The Sister’s,” Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame,” Fernando Pessoa’s”The Book of Disquiet,” T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Emil Cioran’s “A Short History of Decay,” Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and William Faulkner’s “Light in August.”

Cousineau, Professor of English (Emeritus) at Washington College, former visiting professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, and Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bucharest, edited the newsletter of the Samuel Beckett Society for several years and co-directed the “Présence de Samuel Beckett” conference at Le Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-la-Salle in Normandy. He is the author of After the Final No: Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy, Waiting for Godot: Form in Movement, Ritual Unbound: Reading Sacrifice in Modernist Fiction, Three-Part Inventions: The Novels of Thomas Bernhard, An Unwritten Novel: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (recipient of an “Outstanding Title” citation from the American Library Association), and the focus of this event; The Séance of Reading: Uncanny Designs in Modernist Writing

“From Eliot to Fitzgerald to Beckett, Pessoa, and Cioran, Cousineau’s wide-ranging study of literary Modernism offers insightful and sensitive interpretations of major canonical pieces of American and European literature: a rewarding and gracious book.” 

– Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London

“Thomas Cousineau’s “The Séance of Reading” is itself a Séance to read.  His idea that sacrifice, as expressed in the Romanian legend of Manole, holds a key to understanding certain literary classics, shines a fresh and strange light on those classics.”

– John Vernon, Author of “Peter Doyle,” “The Last Canyon,” and “Lucky Billy” 

For more event details contact The Bookplate at 410-778-4167 or [email protected]. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are not required. The next Authors & Oysters event is scheduled for 1/18 with Academy Award-winner, Ernest Thompson. All events are held in the back room of The Retriever. The Retriever is located at 337 ½ High Street, in Chestertown, Maryland. 

The Bookplate is proud to announce the next segment of their Authors & Oysters events at The Retriever Bar. David O. Stewart was featured in the most recent Authors & Oysters event on November 9th with his book, George Washington; The Political Rise of America’s Founding Father. On Wednesday, December 7th at 6pm, all are invited to The Retriever to meet author Douglas Richardson for a book signing and author lecture on his debut thriller; Down Wind and Out of Sight. 

A finalist for the American Fiction Awards, Down Wind and Out of Sight is a strikingly original suspense thriller, populated with unforgettable characters and loaded with bizarre twists and quirky science. It takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride from the Australian outback to a top-secret US government research facility and into the astonishing electronics lab of an adolescent autistic savant. On the other hand, the novel is a compassionate and moving exploration of the unique emotional bonds forged by an improbable cast of damaged and marginalized characters linked by the drive to survive. 

A graduate of Harvard Law School, with a Master’s degree in communications from Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication, Douglas Richardson was a trial lawyer in a large Philadelphia law firm and then a federal prosecutor responsible for complex criminal investigations and high-profile prosecutions.  Later he became legal counsel to Pennsylvania’s mental hospitals before being named Director of Communications for a multi-billion-dollar government agency. In a mid-career shift, Doug became an executive coach and recognized national authority on career management.  As a Certified Master Coach, he has counseled scores of senior executives, attorneys and high-performing project teams on leadership and professional development. His articles and nonfiction writings have appeared in numerous legal and business publications, including Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The American Lawyer, The National Law Journal, Law 360, and The Edge International Review. He wrote the Dow Jones National Business Employment Weekly Premier Guide to Networking and the Bala Creative Group’s Haiku Talks Business, and is co-author of the American Bar Association’s Legal Project Management in One Hour for Lawyers. ​Doug lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and a “variety pack” of three spectacularly gonzo dogs.

“Down Wind and Out of Sight is a unique novel. It’s both a riveting thriller and a compassionate exploration of people who are different. Full of wry wit, compelling characters and unexpected twists, the adventures of people bound together by extraordinary circumstances race to a shocking climax, catching you up in a powerful dynamic you won’t forget.” – Goodreads 5-Star Review

For more event details contact The Bookplate at 410-778-4167 or [email protected]. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are not required. The next Authors & Oysters event is on 12/14 with The Word Girls; Meredith Davies Hadaway, Erin Murphy and Amanda Newell. All events are held in the back room of The Retriever. The Retriever is located at 337 ½ High Street, in Chestertown, Maryland. 

On Saturday, December 3rd at 11am, all are invited to meet local author Lucy Maddox as she signs copies of and discusses her book, “The Parker Sisters: A Border Kidnapping” upstairs at Zelda’s on Cross Street. This event is hosted by The Bookplate as part of the Dickens of a Christmas holiday weekend festival. The back room of The Bookplate has been expanded during the pandemic to include a larger selection of titles, so events such as the popular Authors and Oysters series, are often held off-site.

The Parker Sisters is a nonfiction exploration of the 1851 kidnapping of two free black sisters from Chester County, PA,  just above the Pennsylvania-Maryland state line. 

Lucy Maddox is Professor Emerita of English and American Studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of several books including The People of Rose Hill: Black and White Life on a Maryland Plantation, Nabokov’s Novels in English, Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature & the Politics of Indian Affairs, Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race & Reform. She lives with her husband in Chestertown. 

“The Parker Sisters impresses by the breadth and depth of the impeccable research as well as by its engaging, at times genuinely suspenseful writing. The brisk narrative of the kidnapping of two free black sisters across the Mason-Dixon Line comes to life here. Maddox is a skillful historian who enters a single case so fully that the Fugitive Slave Act becomes understandable in a very direct way. This is an outstanding book.” – Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Research Professor of English Literature, Harvard University

Then at 2pm on the same day, join us back at Zelda’s to meet NPR’s Maureen Corrigan as she discusses her book, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be And Why It Endures. Corrigan’s book asks us; how well do we really know The Great Gatsby? While Fitzgerald’s masterpiece may be one of the most popular novels in America, many of us first read it when we were too young to fully comprehend its power. Offering a fresh perspective on what makes Gatsby great — and utterly unusual — So We Read On takes us into archives, high school classrooms, and even out onto the Long Island Sound to explore the novel’s hidden depths, a journey whose revelations include Gatsby ‘s surprising debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its rocky path to recognition as a “classic,” and its profound commentaries on the national themes of race, class, and gender. (And we can’t think of a more appropriate location to discuss this book than at Zelda’s!)

Maureen Corrigan is the book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air and the author of Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading. Winner of an Edgar Award for criticism, she has written essays and reviews for many publications. She teaches literature at Georgetown University, where she is the critic in residence, and lives with her husband and daughter in Washington, D.C.

“Maureen Corrigan has produced a minor miracle: a book about The Great Gatsby that stands up to Gatsby itself.” -Michael Cunningham, author of The Snow Queen

For more event details contact The Bookplate at 410-778-4167 or [email protected]. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are not required. Zelda’s Speakeasy is located at 108 S. Cross Street, in Chestertown, Maryland. The Bookplate will continue its popular Authors & Oysters series at The Retriever Bar on 12/7 with Doug Richardson and his thriller, “Down Wind and Out of Sight”.