Meet Our Newest Author: Flora Burlingame!
We are excited to announce we are adding award-winning author Flora Burlingame to our Acorn family. Not only is her novel, PATH OF PROGRESS, inspirational and relevant, it is also being released as we approach the 100 year anniversary of a woman's right to vote. We are thrilled. Welcome to Acorn, Flora!
Flora Beach Burlingame has had three careers: Motherhood (on-going), Paralegal (retired), and Journalist/writer (on-going). She has lived in various California locations and currently resides in beautiful, western Washington State.
During career #3 she won awards for her short stories, published free-lance magazine articles, and served as contributing editor for the Mariposa Museum and History Center’s quarterly newsletter. For a number of years, she wrote a column and features for The Fresno Bee, a major California newspaper, and during that time was commissioned by The Bee to write a hundred years of history on three California counties for a Centennial edition.
Flora’s interest in history came from her father, a high school history teacher, who she says, “always knew the history of anywhere we traveled.” Stories of the past dominate Flora’s writing. In 2011, after countless hours of research in addition to the writing, her historical novel, Charcoal and Chalk: John Ogilvie and the Beginnings of Black Education in Texas was published. That story, based on an actual teacher of the freedmen during Civil War Reconstruction, also led to Flora’s current book, Path of Progress, the unique perspective of a man’s fight for women’s rights during the late eighteen hundreds and early twentieth century.
PATH OF PROGRESS will be released through Acorn in February of 2019
It’s the late 1800s, and John Ogilvie Stevenson, pastor of the Congregational Church in Waterloo, Iowa, believes women are equal to men in intelligence, and superior to men morally and spiritually.
During a sermon on temperance, wherein he advocates laws to shut down the saloons, he is struck with the irony that his audiences are composed mostly of women—that segment of the citizenry who cannot vote. Thus begins his campaign for women’s suffrage. A large portion of the public believes a woman’s place is in the home, that she has no business in politics, and probably isn’t smart enough to vote.
Every two years the Iowa state legislature considers putting an amendment on the ballot for a public vote on the issue and time after time it doesn’t get that far. The Reverend John Stevenson never gives up. Through the triumphs and tragedies of his own personal life, he is determined to forge the path of progress.
You can visit Flora's website at
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