Donna Everhart

Donna Everhart writes historical fiction rooted in the rural American South, with particular attention to work, family, survival, and the pressures exerted by place. The Saints of Swallow Hill is her 2022 Kensington novel set among Depression-era turpentine camps in Georgia and North Carolina. Its intersecting stories follow Rae Lynn Cobb and Del Reese as difficult circumstances drive them toward dangerous labor and an uncertain community. Everhart drew on the history of the naval-stores industry, in which workers cut pine trees and collected resin under harsh camp conditions. The setting extends interests visible across her novels, including The Education of Dixie Dupree, The Road to Bittersweet, and The Moonshiner’s Daughter. A North Carolina native, she has described Southern history and working lives as central to her fiction. The Saints of Swallow Hill turns that regional focus into a story about friendship, reinvention, and the costs borne by people with few choices during the Great Depression.