Julie Stielstra

Julie Stielstra hopes she won’t be trapped in the Chicago suburbs much longer, and escapes regularly to her 100-year-old farmhouse in very central Kansas. She is the author of almost three dozen short stories and essays, appearing in Zahir Tales, Potomac Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Plains Review, The Examined Life Journal, Meadowlark 105 Reader, the seven-story chapbook Protected Contact and Other Stories, and elsewhere. Minerva Rising Press named her historical novella Pilgrim the winner of their 2016 novella contest, and her novel Opulence, Kansas from Meadowlark Press won the 2021 gold medal for Young Adult Fiction from the Midwest Independent Publishers Association. She blogs on books, writing, reading, animals and whatever else takes her fancy at juliestielstra.com.

Scratched

Young Adult Fiction

Fifteen-year-old Luis Romero has lived his whole life on the back side of horse racing. Seven days a week, undocumented people like his mother Blanca live and work to feed, groom, exercise, care for, and clean up after the high-strung horses with long pedigrees. It's not just your job - it's your home, your life, your community. Lose the job, and you lose everything. A cheap trainer with a pill habit entices Luis to help her take care of her horses, pulling him deeper into a future on the track...but when Blanca takes up with a security guard with another agenda, it may all fall apart. Luis has to decide, for the sake of his family and his life, what race he really wants to run.

Opulence, Kansas

Young Adult Fiction

Daughter of privilege, private-school student Katie Myrdal’s world is rocked when her finance-wizard father is found dead in his Porsche—a suicide. There’s more wreckage to clean up than she could have imagined. Katie escapes to the Kansas farmstead of her barely-known aunt and uncle near the small town of Opulence. Plummeting from a high-rise, big city condo to a tree-shrouded, yellow house on the prairie, Katie discovers other kinds of richness—the wealth of friendship, hidden gifts, tragic secrets, and how the balm of time will help her turn her life in a new direction.​

Pilgrim

Historical Fiction

Pascale is the only child of a drunken horse trader and his long-suffering wife in thirteenth century France. Pascale’s mother, tormented by imagined sins, sets off to walk the pilgrimage road to Santiago in expiation – with her reluctant daughter, an opinionated donkey and one gallant stray dog. Whose journey is this, really?