Khristeena Lute

A book titled 'Whipoorwill Sing' by Khristeena Lute, featuring an illustrated cover with a bird and a butterfly flying over a purple landscape at sunset.
Close-up of a woman with long dark hair, blue eyes, and fair skin, sitting outdoors near a brick wall, wearing a dark blue top, with her hand touching her face.

An Appalachian transplant to the North, Khristeena has been living near the Adirondacks in upstate New York since 2016, when she finished her Ph.D. in English and took a full-time faculty position at a community college. Splitting her writing life between creative, nonfiction, and academic topics provides the best of these worlds—in-depth research skills and knowledge combined with an eye for style and story.

Her newest publication is Whippoorwill Sing, which centers on college-dropout Atlas as she faces the daunting task of saving the family home in a rundown Appalachian town. There, she also finds work in a museum housed in a former sanatorium, rumored to be haunted. Atlas's life becomes evermore complicated when she must face the ghosts of her own family’s legacies in order to ensure that it has a future. Lute's masterfully written second novel, Whippoorwill Sing in the genre of Appalachian Gothic, shows the author's talent for capturing her own roots.

Coming June 2026 from Thorncraft Publishing