A southerner by birth, Shelley Burchfield's love of history and all things southern is evident in her debut novel, THE EARTH REMAINS, winner of the 2023 Readers Favorite Book Awards Gold Medal in Christian Historical Fiction and named a finalist in the 2023 American Fiction Awards. A former teacher, Burchfield enjoys writing "what-if" southern fiction that flips notorious events upside down. She enjoys mountain hikes, hot coffee, and stacks of books yet to be read on a bedside table. She lives in the beautiful Upstate of South Carolina with her husband and a menagerie of animals and pulls inspiration from the majestic Blue Ridge Mountains beyond her windows. Her second historical fiction novel, CLIMBING TO THE SUN, was published in October 2023, and recently won the Bronze Medal in the 2024 Readers' Favorite International Book Awards contest. Set in the autumn of 1928. Herbalist and healer Callie Beecham owns a shop in tiny Pickens, South Carolina, and makes a living treating people with plant-based medicines and therapies. When a young man urgently knocks on her door one morning, Callie finds her world turned upside down. He begs Callie to come to the freed-slave settlement of Liberia, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to save his wife, struggling in childbirth. On the back of a mule, Callie follows the man to Liberia and discovers a world previously unknown to her, and a desire to help the people there. Her desire to help the residents of Liberia quickly angers the wrong people in town—important people who will stop at nothing to see her gone for good.