New York Times bestselling author Kristy Woodson Harvey returns to the fictional, sleepy, seaside town of Cape Carolina in her newest novel “Summer State of Mind.”
Hitting shelves on Tuesday, the reader meets a burned-out neonatal intensive care unit nurse that crosses paths with an injured former baseball star who finds an abandoned newborn in their tight-knit community, Harvey explained.
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A contemporary women’s fiction author, Harvey was on her way home from the Piedmont to Beaufort a few weeks ago when she carved out a few minutes of her day for a chat with Coastal Review.
She said that “Summer State of Mind” is a companion to her “Under the Southern Sky,” a 2021 novel about two childhood friends and neighbors, Parker and Amelia, raised in Cape Carolina, and the book in which she introduces secondary characters, aunt Tilley and Parker’s older brother, Mason.
In “Summer State of Mind,” the “very eccentric” Southern aunt and baseball player Mason are the primary characters along with Daisy, the NICU nurse who is new to the coastal setting, Harvey said.
The plot was inspired by a newspaper article written about an ICU nurse who adopted an abandoned baby, “and it just stuck with me for a long time,” Harvey explained. She mentioned the article to a friend who is an ICU nurse, and the friend shared with Harvey that she knew others with similar experiences. Then a book crossed her desk about nurses who had to make really difficult decisions, “and those kinds of gray areas where sometimes we find ourselves, and (then the novel) all came together.”
Harvey is getting ready to head out Friday to Charleston, South Carolina, to begin her “Summer State of Mind” launch tour. She will be back in eastern North Carolina on Sunday for brunch hosted by the Beaufort Historical Association in Atlantic Beach.
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The rest of her tour takes her to Greensboro on Monday, and then on Tuesday, when the book is officially released, she has events in Greenville, South Carolina, and Salisbury, before heading May 6 to Chapel Hill and Raleigh.
Outside of the Carolinas, Harvey has events in Tampa, Florida, on May 7, followed by Franklin, Indiana, on May 8, then Webster Groves, Missouri, on May 9. She heads further west May 10 to Gig Harbor and May 11 to Seattle, both in Washington, and then on May 12 San Diego, California, for two events.
She will return to the east coast for events May 16 in Sneads Ferry and Ocean Isle Beach, and wraps up her tour in South Carolina May 17 for Pawleys Island and Columbia and then Camden on May 18. Tickets and more details are available on her website.
With this book being released in May and then “Falling for Peachtree Bluff,” the fifth installment of her “Peachtree Series” expected to come out in September, the second leg of her 2026 tour will be announced is this fall.
The road to Southern fiction
Harvey grew up in Salisbury, where she said she fell in love with writing when she was a senior year in high school. She was an intern at a “great, small-town daily newspaper.”
“I was actually going to medical school and decided to become a journalist instead, because I just absolutely fell in love with writing for newspapers,” she said.
As an intern at the Salisbury Post, “I just fell in love with writing for newspapers and interviewing people, and so I ended up going to journalism school at UNC and just ate it up. Just loved it,” she said. During that time, she worked on the university’s Blue & White magazine and served as its managing editor.
Harvey explained that when she earned her undergraduate degree in 2007, it was an unusual time in journalism because of increasingly adopted internet service, which “hadn’t really hit its stride yet, and the future of journalism was looking a little questionable.”
She decided to pursue her master’s in literature, with the thought that, if writing doesn’t work out, she can teach. But life sent her on a different path. After grad school, she started working in finance but continued to freelance as a writer.
She also began weaving together storylines. And though she took creative writing classes in college, she never really planned to write fiction.
“I think there was something really perfect about the way that it unfolded, because I started getting these ideas and then decided that I was going to write a book just to see if I could, just for myself,” Harvey said.
When she began writing, it wasn’t with the expectation of publishing or becoming an author, which she said was the right approach for her because there was no pressure in it at all. She wanted to see if this was something she could do.
“And I kept writing, and I kept writing,” and by the time she had her third manuscript, she decided to submit her work to literary agents.
She sold her debut novel “Dear Carolina” to a publishing house in 2014, and the book was out in 2015. Set in Kinston, the work follows the path of two women from different circles who bond over the adoption of a baby girl.
Her second book, “Lies and Other Acts of Love,” is set in her hometown of Salisbury, she said. This standalone 2016 novel delves into family secrets.
Harvey initially planned to set her next project, the Peachtree Bluff series, in Beaufort, but “then I realized how incredibly freeing it was to be able to just make up a town” and build the world to suit the story.
She draws inspiration from the beach communities on the East Coast like Beaufort, calling the fictional towns “loose interpretations” of places she knows, all with the goal to give the readers small southern towns.
“That’s what I know, and also because I think it resonates with readers,” she said, giving them a touchpoint that they can return to again and again.
The “Peachtree Series” launched in 2017, the same year she and her husband decided to try Beaufort out full time.
Harvey explained that they bought their house in Beaufort in 2012 and had spent about 18 months remodeling what they had planned to be their beach house. They had been driving to and from Carteret County, “And when our son was in preschool, we decided to move for one year, and now he’s in eighth grade and we still haven’t left,” she said about their move to Carteret County. By then she had published her third book.
The beauty of Carteret County, aka the “Crystal Coast” in marketing materials, and its residents are special to her.
Being from Salisbury, Harvey’s family was much closer to South Carolina beaches, and with her father being from Wilmington, “When we were going to the beach, we were either going to Wrightsville or Litchfield. And so, it was new for me, and I just fell in love with it right away.”
‘Friends & Fiction’ podcast
Harvey co-hosts “Friends & Fiction” with New York Times bestselling authors Mary Kay Andrews, Kristin Harmel and Patti Callahan Henry.
The podcast launched in 2020 when Andrews texted a handful of authors who had books scheduled to publish, but all their tours had been canceled because of COVID-19, and, “we were really worried about independent bookstores. There was no foot traffic, there was no events.”
While brainstorming about ways to reach their readers and help the small businesses, they decided to go live on Facebook and talk about their new books and remind people to support their independent bookstores.
“The first night we did it, we didn’t think anyone would show up,” she said, but a thousand people tuned in. The bestselling authors decided to go live every Wednesday night for seven weeks, when the hosts’ books would be out. And now, the show is coming up on its six-year anniversary, with 350,000 members.
“It’s just like a nice corner of the internet world where people can talk about books,” Harvey said. “We’re really good friends and we love what we’re doing, and we love supporting authors, and our mission is still to support independent bookstores, and as long as, as long as viewers keep showing up to watch, we’re going to keep going.”
One benefit of the podcast is that it pushes Harvey to read books outside of her preferred genres before interviewing the authors.
“I’ve read so many things that I never would have read, but I did because the author was going to be a guest,” and through that process, she said she’s discovered new authors, genres and novels that broadened her view in some way. “I do think reading really widely can really help inform our own writing.”
She added that she loves to hear from the authors and the paths they took.
“It’s so cool to me how people just come to the page in such wildly different ways. And everybody has their own journey. Everybody has their own writing process.”
In addition to the two books released this year, “A Happier Life,” her 2024 work set in a historic Beaufort home, is in development for film by MGM/Amazon.
“The Summer of Songbirds,” the 2023 novel about lifelong friends who met as children at summer camp, is in development for television with Hulu, and a handful of other projects are in various stages of option or development for film and television, according to her provided bio. Her work has been Southern Living, Parade, Traditional Home, USA TODAY and other publications.
With more than a decade of full-time writing behind her, Harvey told Coastal Review that she loves watching the story unfold as she writes it.
“I’m so happy that I did it. I always look back and think, ‘What if I’d never done this?’ I never would have known,” she said.
Harvey remains unsure what life will look like in the next five years, but her plan is to focus on “writing my next best book and what’s the next best step.”
