The Library Presents will be bringing best-selling writer Lisa Wingate to Turlock in November for the ongoing series’ third author presentation.

The event is set for 2 p.m. Nov. 5 at the Carnegie Arts Center. Tickets are $20 and went on sale on Friday.

The Library Presents was formed with an eye towards securing programs that appeal to children, teens and/or adults and connect the community. The program is overseen by the Friends of the Turlock Library. A large donation launched the program and has previously brought best-selling authors Jamie Ford and Tara Westover to town.

Wingate is a former journalist, inspirational speaker, and #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of 30 novels. Her work has garnered or been nominated for many awards, including the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize, the Oklahoma Book Award, The Carol Award, the Christy Award, and the RT Booklovers Reviewer’s Choice Award.

“The Library presents committee is proud to announce our third author, Lisa Wingate, a popular choice among many book clubs,” said committee chairperson Pat Portwood.

“Before We Were Yours,” published in 2017, was a blockbuster hit for Wingate. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 10 months, was Publishers Weekly‘s #3 longest running bestseller of 2017, and was voted by readers as the 2017 Goodreads Choice Award for Historical Fiction. The story is based on the true accounts of the Tennessee Children's Home Society. Established in 1897, the Society operated a chain of orphanages that gained notoriety when it was discovered a branch operator was a child trafficker who organized kidnapping children and illegally adopting them out to unsuspecting parents. In addition to her fiction novel, Wingate co-authored a non-fiction book in 2019 with Judy Christie, “Before and After: The Incredible Real-Life Stories of Orphans Who Survived the Tennessee Children's Home Society.”

Wingate’s April 2020 novel, “The Book Of Lost Friends,” became an instant New York Times bestseller. The story follows an unlikely trio of girls coming of age as they embark on a perilous journey through reconstruction Louisiana and Texas and a modern-day teacher in small-town Louisiana who rediscovers their story.
“The Book Of Lost Friends” was inspired by the real-life “Lost Friends” ads, through which families separated during slavery sought to find their lost loved ones in the chaos following the Civil War. A reader and museum volunteer from the Historic New Orleans Collection connected Wingate with HNOC’s vast database of more than 2,500 Lost Friends ads, which chronicle the heart-wrenching and hope-filled searches of separated families, and which inspired the story of eighteen-year-old Hannie Gossett in the novel.

Wingate has gained a reputation as a talented inspirational speaker. She has said he own inspiration to become a writer came when she was in first-grade and a teacher told her she expected to see Lisa’s name in a magazine one day. Wingate also entertained childhood dreams of being an Olympic gymnast and winning the National Finals Rodeo but was “stalled by a mental block against backflips on the balance beam and by parents who stubbornly refused to finance a rodeo career,” she said.

Tickets can be purchased through a link on the Friends of the Turlock Library Facebook page.