2023 Author Expo Author

Mary Nolan Brown, a Fernandina Beach native, is back this year with her award-winning young adult novel Picketing the President and her latest release Trouble in Texas, a middle school adventure.
Picketing the President, which begins and ends in Fernandina in the winter of 1918-19, recounts Delia Nolan’s experiences as she accompanies her elderly, lame grandmother Mary Nolan to Washington, D.C., to join Alice Paul and other suffragists picketing for women’s right to vote.
Picketing the President has been awarded the Colorado Independent Publishers Association 2023 Silver EVVY award in the young adult category. Last year Picketing the President was one of the submissions chosen for the 2022 Amelia Island Festival Authors in Schools program.
Trouble in Texas is set in northeast Texas in the summer of 1944. The reader can follow city boy Matt as he learns there is more going on in a small town than meets the eye. There are rustlers and Texas Rangers, eight mules, two dogs, an ornery rooster, a rabid fox, and a tornado. There is no end to adventures for Matt and his new friend Joshua. As if all of this isn’t enough, Matt is sure his grandpa doesn’t like him. All of this makes for one summer neither Matt nor the reader will forget.
Both Picketing the President and Trouble in Texas contain fictional accounts of actual events. As the saying goes, “Only the names (in most cases) have been changed to protect the innocent.” A sequel to Picketing the President is planned for 2024.
A 1954 FHS alumnae, Mary Nolan Brown has been writing since she was in middle school - first poetry and then prose. She is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, the Coastal Kid’s Writers and Illustrators, and the Savannah Learning Center Writers Circle.