SLA Buff Blog: 2025 in Review
The Saint Louis Author (SLA) Buff blog highlights the unique and surprising authors who live and write in Mound City.
I started this blog this past summer to find out and share what it’s like for authors to write in St. Louis. I ended up posting six interviews with six wildly different authors, who all generously described why and what it meant to them to work and write here.
Chris Naffziger, a local historian, walked me through the physical remains of the Lemp brewing empire that inspired him to publish his first book, Adam Lemp and the Western Brewery, after years of research and publishing on his architectural history blog, St. Louis Patina and articles in Saint Louis Magazine.
Shana Youngdahl’s A Catalog of Burnt Objects introduced me to Young Adult (YA) literature, a genre I don’t naturally encounter, but grew to appreciate from reading her fictionalized account of how young people might have experienced the catastrophic wildfires in Paradise, California in 2018.
Like Naffziger’s Lemp book, Matt Sorrell’s Matt’s St. Louis Food Story is a culmination of years of expertise working in and around the St. Louis food scene. It exposes a taste of each featured restaurant, specialty grocery store or cocktail bar that you wouldn’t otherwise gather without going there.
My conversation with Ciera Horton McElroy about becoming a debut author in St. Louis with Atomic Family helped me to understand that St. Louis has an extraordinary literary and cafe culture. Our multiple independant bookstores are a credit to the region.
Minsoo Kang’s The Melancholy of Untold History is a fantastic work of speculative fiction that I wouldn’t have expected to read, but found fascinating and weird.
And finally, the week that the Mill Creek: Black Metropolis exhibit opened at the Missouri History Museum, Vivian Gibson was kind enough to talk to me about writing The Last Children of Mill Creek, which inspired the exhibit.
I am so grateful to these authors for their work, and for their willingness to talk about it with me. I can’t wait to meet more St. Louis authors and read their books in 2026.
