Meredith Sue Willis

As a prequel to the Meredith Sue Willis's acclaimed sci-fi novel THE CITY BUILT OF STARSHIPS, this tale relates the adventures of a girl reaching womanhood while living in "the world with two suns." Soledad, intelligent and strong-willed, must make sense of life and love in a stark quasi-Buddhist community attempting to survive on an alien planet. She succeeds -- but just barely.Soledad faces multiple challenges in The Encampment, the isolated, cult-like group of refugees who fled The City Built of Starships years ago. The larger community -- the result of earthlings having emigrated from the home planet several generations earlier -- started out as an organized effort to colonize what they call the Second World. But the new settlement quickly degenerated into a brutal class system: dominant Officers holding sway over subordinate Hands. Resisting this hierarchy, a band of rebels sought desert solitude to escape tyranny and to follow a meditative Path. Young Soledad, growing up in this community and now approaching adulthood, must make sense of herself and her place in a dangerous world. She finds solace in friendships with a few peers and, especially, in her interactions with bizarre pterodactyl-like creatures called yaegers. Little by little she understands both the limits to her freedom and a way to follow her own path.SOLEDAD IN THE DESERT presents both a fully realized alternate reality and a thoughtful, observant protagonist intent on finding her place in a world that often makes no sense but nonetheless presents an intelligent young woman with opportunities to find meaning.

Tired of her upscale private academy in New York City, fifteen-year-old Meli Rossi transfers to Ciudad City School of the Future, which provides an individualized curriculum, an opportunity to make real friends, and insights into her mother's unconventional background in the 1960s.

Meredith Sue Willis's Out of the Mountains is a collection of thirteen short stories set in contemporary Appalachia. Firmly grounded in place, the stories voyage out into the conflicting cultural identities that native Appalachians experience as they balance mainstream and mountain identities. Willis's stories explore the complex negotiations between longtime natives of the region and its newcomers and the rifts that develop within families over current issues such as mountaintop removal and homophobia. Always, however, the situations depicted in these stories are explored in the service of a deeper understanding of the people involved, and of the place. This is not the mythic version of Appalachia, but the Appalachia of the twenty-first century.

Meredith Sue Willis's Out of the Mountains is a collection of thirteen short stories set in contemporary Appalachia. Firmly grounded in place, the stories voyage out into the conflicting cultural identities that native Appalachians experience as they balance mainstream and mountain identities. Willis's stories explore the complex negotiations between longtime natives of the region and its newcomers and the rifts that develop within families over current issues such as mountaintop removal and homophobia. Always, however, the situations depicted in these stories are explored in the service of a deeper understanding of the people involved, and of the place. This is not the mythic version of Appalachia, but the Appalachia of the twenty-first century.

A twelve-year-old girl attempts to understand and accept her affluent, white cousin while living in a multiracial, eccentric family.

On a distant world where interplanetary colonists have struggled for generations to survive, a young woman named Espera travels to the fabled City Built of Starships on a quest that may determine the fate of the human species.