The critically acclaimed author of The Rib King returns with an eagerly anticipated collection of interlocking short stories including the title story written exclusively for this volume, that explore relationships between friends, family and strangers in a Black neighborhood over fifteen years.

Tombolo Books is thrilled to welcome Ladee Hubbard to the bookstore to tell us more about her stunning short story collection, The Last Suspicious Holdout! Hubbard will be in conversation with Dr. Lillian Dunlap, the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Your Real Stories!

Ladee Hubbard is the author of The Rib King and The Talented Ribkins, which received the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, The Times Literary Supplement, Copper Nickel and Callaloo. Hubbard is a recipient of a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She has also received fellowships from MacDowell, Art Omi, the Sacatar Foundation, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Born in Massachusetts and raised in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Florida, Ladee Hubbard currently lives in New Orleans.

Lillian Dunlap is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Your Real Stories, Inc., and Co-Creator/Director of its Decades of Day Work and St Pete Stories series and the annual week-long storytelling festival, Story Days in Tampa Bay. Lillian is a former television news reporter/anchor/producer and former professor at Indiana University, the University of Missouri School of Journalism and resident faculty at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. Lillian holds an undergraduate degree in music from Defiance College and a master of music education (voice) and Ph.D. in communication and culture from Indiana University. She is a founding director of I.U.’s African American Arts Institute and longtime diversity and inclusion coach. Lillian has coached professors at over 40 U.S. universities, and journalists and media managers on four different continents. Among her clients are the South African Broadcasting Corporation, the University of Central Lancashire (UK), and the Association of Independent Journalists in Belgrade, Serbia.