Adele Myers

Adele Myers grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, on her grandmother's stories about the women she called the tobacco wives. The grandmother had done the hair of Winston-Salem tobacco magnates' wives in the 1940s. Myers took a journalism degree at Chapel Hill, spent a long career in advertising and public relations, and has taught as an adjunct at the school where she studied. Her March 2022 debut, The Tobacco Wives, came from William Morrow. It sets a young seamstress, Maddie Sykes, in fictional Bright Leaf, North Carolina in 1946, stitching gowns in her aunt's shop for the wives of the tobacco bosses and stumbling on research that the product is unsafe, particularly for pregnant women, just as a new cigarette is being marketed to them. Booksellers made it an Indie Next pick and a Barnes & Noble Discover selection.