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