Lake Travis Reads: Kate Winkler Dawson

Join us for Lake Travis Reads with local author Kate Winkler Dawson. Dawson is a seasoned documentary producer, podcaster, TV news producer, and celebrated true crime historian whose work has appeared in The New York Times, WCBS News, ABC News Radio, PBS NewsHour, and Nightline. She is the author of five true crime books and the creator of three podcasts, Tenfold More Wicked, Wicked Words, and Buried Bones, which has approximately 1.5 million downloads a month. An Austin local, Dawson is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas.
Dawson’s latest book, The Sinners All Bow, tells the chilling true story of a young woman whose scandalous life and shocking death was rumored to be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s inspiration for the character of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a small New England town. When her troubled past and a secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist Minister, the Reverend Ephraim Avery, was uncovered, more questions emerged. Was Sarah’s death a suicide… or something much darker? In The Sinners All Bow, Dawson uses modern forensic techniques as well as access to hundreds of unpublished materials and archival resources at Brown University to make fresh discoveries, fill in missing clues, and dispel two centuries worth of myth and lore surrounding the case.
Copies of The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne will be available for purchase, courtesy of Flutter Bookstore, and signing by the author at the event.
Lake Travis Reads is a One Book, One Community program whose goal is to bring the Lake Travis communities together through the shared reading and discussion of the works of our favorite authors. Lake Travis Reads is co-sponsored by Bee Cave Public Library, Lake Travis Community Library, and Spicewood Community Library.