Sandi Kahn Shelton is the writer behind the blog for readers and writers called BooksNewHaven. author of four and a half novels (just finishing her latest) she uses the blog to promote and encourage interaction between writers and their audience, and does frequent interviews with authors, many of them in Connecticut. When she interviewed Kathy Leonard Czepiel, I asked if I could re-post here, because the novel, A Violet Season, sounded fascinating. Here’s the beginning of the interview:

Kathy Czepiel’s beautiful new novel talks about sacrifice, women’s lives…and violets

Kathy Leonard Czepiel is the author of A Violet Season, a historical novel set on a Hudson Valley violet farm on the eve of the twentieth century.

She is the recipient of a 2012 creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals including Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, CALYX, Confrontation, and The Pinch. Czepiel teaches in the First-Year Writing Program at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, where she lives with her husband and their two daughters.
Come and hear her talk about the history of the violet industry and listen to excerpts from her novel at New Haven’s Mitchell Library in Westville on Monday, October 29^th at 6:30 p.m.
Tell us about your new book.
A Violet Season is set on a Hudson Valley violet farm operated by three brothers at the turn of the twentieth century. Ida Fletcher, who is married to the black sheep youngest brother, has taken up wet nursing to help pay the bills, and her teenage daughter, Alice, has been forced to leave school Read more here:
You can find her on Facebook and Twitter as well as at her website