Devon Halliday Author Event

6:30pm Friday, November 6
at Prologue Bookshop

About To Stay, To Stay, To Stay:

Longlisted for the Center for Fiction 2026 First Novel Prize!

An ensemble cast collides and crosses paths in their small corner of the Midwest where no one is a stranger: the baker, the realtor, the poet, the gardener, the frustrated artist. In Devon Halliday’s transcendent debut novel, secrets turn contagious, impulses transform into resolutions, and no one is certain whether they will remain in the confines of their Appalachian college town or step out into the unknown.

Devon Halliday is a Pushcart Prize winner and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellow. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Liberties, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. This is her debut novel.

Lee Martin is the Pulitzer Prize Finalist author of The Bright Forever. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Harper’s, Ms., The Best American Essays, The Best American Mystery Stories, Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, among others. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. A native Midwesterner, he teaches in the MFA program at The Ohio State University.