As she watches over the birds in her yard, Olivia feels like an “accidental”-a migratory bird blown off course. Finding herself in the small paper mill town of Opelika, Mississippi, Olivia dreams of living a much larger life-seeing Paris and returning to her wartime job at a landing boat factory in New Orleans. The novel follows the lives of two sisters, Grace and June McAlister, whose mother, Olivia, dies from a botched abortion in the pre-Roe vs.

Minrose’s 2019 novel, The Accidentals, has been described by Kirkus Reviews as “an important story about women's reproductive rights and the consequences of limited choices will transport readers to the rural Mississippi of a bygone era.” Writing in Women’s Review of Books, Margaret Randall calls the book “a major work by someone whose earlier novels already marked her as one of this generation’s great novelists.” The Accidentals is the 2020 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction She has spent many summers leading creative writing workshops at the University of New Mexico Writers' Conference in Taos and Santa Fe. She lives in Austin, TX, and Albuquerque, NM.

She has taught as a professor at universities around the country, most recently at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. MINROSE GWIN'S MOST RECENT BOOKS are the novels The Accidentals (William Morrow/HarperCollins), Promise (William Morrow/HarperCollins) and The Queen of Palmyra (HarperCollins/Harper Perennial), a memoir, Wishing for Snow (HarperCollins/Harper Perennial), and Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement (University of Georgia Press).Ī native of Tupelo, Mississippi, Minrose has been a writer all of her working life, starting out as a newspaper and wire service reporter and working in Mobile, Atlanta, Nashville, and Knoxville.

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