Today we’d like to introduce you to Shana Thornton.
Hi Shana, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
In 2012, I founded Thorncraft Publishing, a publishing company dedicated to women authors, especially those from or connected to Tennessee. After serving as editor-in-chief of an online women’s magazine, Her Circle Ezine, that focused on global women’s arts and activism, I knew that I wanted to do work in publishing, but I didn’t want to move away from my home state of Tennessee, nor did I want to enter a publishing house focused on a genre that didn’t interest me. At the same time, I traded my novel with the senior editor who worked with me at Her Circle Ezine. Though Melissa Corliss DeLorenzo lived in Massachusetts, we spoke daily, and in fact, we communicated weekly with our staff who could be located anywhere in the world, with the majority being spread across the United States. We communicated via Skype and started an early podcast series. This was all in 2008. Melissa interviewed women authors who were dabbling in self-publishing and print on demand, and said to me during one of our daily meetings something like, “One of us needs to start a publishing company focused on women authors, or we’re going to be behind the curve.”
A friend here in Clarksville offered to be a beta reader for my first novel that was in draft. Kitty Madden offered to line edit the book in exchange for my promise to read her partner’s novella. Her partner, Beverly Fisher, was also a friend and a local attorney. I didn’t know that she was a writer as well. Kitty and I had always shared our love of literature and reading as part of our friendship, so I welcomed the exchange.
After the challenge from Melissa and reading Beverly’s novella, which I read in one sitting and knew I wanted to publish, Thorncraft Publishing as a publishing entity representing women authors was born. I wanted to be dedicated to Tennessee authors and stories first, and Beverly’s book was ready to go. She always says that it had been edited, agented, shopped around New York, almost sold, and then sat in a drawer for 20 years waiting for me to be born and grow up. I published Grace Among the Leavings (2013) less than a year after establishing Thorncraft and educating myself as much as I could before taking on another author. And yet, I didn’t want to limit the publishing company to Tennessee stories and authors only, as I knew too many other women authors, Melissa being number one, who were writers communicating experiences and stories that I wanted Thorncraft to represent and share with the world. Melissa has written two novels so far, The Mosquito Hours (2014) and Talking Underwater (2015).
After that, I have tried different books and genres, being careful to allow Thorncraft the time to grow slowly. I quickly learned that books are about legacies, and they each have their own life cycle that can’t be predicted by a previous book.
Thorncraft has led me into different types of publishing as well. I care deeply about where I live. I have personally authored four novels focused on Tennessee, and I now represent seven women authors and publish their work. In 2019, I founded the Clarksville-Montgomery County African American Legacy Trail, a print publication and online driving tour to different locations related to Black history and culture in Montgomery County. Since that time, I have initiated an African American Oral History project through the Montgomery County Archives that is funded by the County government. I am also the vice-president of the Friends of Dunbar Cave State Park. As a seventh generation Tennessean, my commitment is to the stories about and from Tennesseans. For that reason, one of my highest honors is serving as the Montgomery County Deputy Historian. I was approved by the Montgomery County Commission and appointed by the Montgomery County Mayor, Wes Golden, to serve a seven-year voluntary position.
The publishing journey as led me to unexpected places. I was on track to get a PhD in literature, and I stopped the process during my time at Her Circle Ezine, which showed the disparities in publishing. We covered that topic frequently because we heard about it in all of the arts—from journalism, to traditional novelists’ publishing deals, to art shows in galleries, to laws affecting women’s rights and free speech. I saw how connected all of these were and that is part of what continues to push me and Thorncraft Publishing. We have won several awards for books; in the American Writing Awards, first place in poetry for Canopies of Bones and Breathable Air by Wanda McNabb (2025), Finalist in Mystery/Suspense and Book Cover for The Postmaster’s Daughter by Sharon Mabry (2023), Finalist in New Release Nonfiction for The Blue Box & Memories that Live in the Bones by Sharon Mabry (2024), Finalist for Book Cover for Canopies of Bones and Breathable Air (2025), and Winner in Legacy Fiction for my novel Poke Sallet Queen & the Family Medicine Wheel in 2025. In the Indie Excellence Awards, The Postmaster’s Daughter by Sharon Mabry was a finalist in debut fiction.
The CMC African American Legacy Trail has won three awards for service in Clarksville and Montgomery County.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Beginning a company means embracing challenges because they make you a better leader, create a learning opportunity, and/or present alternatives you hadn’t previously considered. While I might grumble about challenges that interrupt my flow or take up more time than needed, especially the first time I face a particular challenge, I do try to keep a sense of humor knowing that I will see the challenge differently in hindsight. With publishing, that has involved learning new technologies myself, investing in my own training to complete tasks I didn’t know how to solve in the beginning, and asking where to get new information so that I am staying informed about the industry changes. Opening doors for newcomers in any industry is a challenge, especially if they don’t have direct connections through affiliates, friends, families, etc. Fortunately, those challenges to get into bookstores and writing conferences in my middle TN area have pushed me to learn how to do that and to take the risks to simply ask. It does amaze me how many people are afraid of rejection in that the fear of it stops them from practicing the ask. Many entities save you from the face-to-face flush of rejection now, and even the personal letter of rejection no longer arrives in print from most organizations, as they have protocols available online and submission forms. All of that takes the sting out of the challenge a little more, and I’ve learned to adapt and to make more compelling arguments for the books by Thorncraft Publishing.
The market is also saturated with books, all types of them. That is a challenge that I not only have to face but I have to make sure that my authors know what Thorncraft Publishing is capable of doing for them in publishing. They are inspired by audience, most of them, and that makes the process smooth. They are authors who want to connect with readers and new outlets. Thorncraft Publishing doesn’t have to do that alone. Most of them go after space in their respective regions.
The authors are traditionally signed authors, and Thorncraft Publishing the imprint handles their copyright, Library of Congress registration, publication, distribution, etc.
Through Thorncraft Publishing, we do offer work-for-hire publishing and editing services and we do not represent or publish those authors under Thorncraft Publishing. This is another way for Thorncraft to do business without signing traditional authors and it allows us to work with men without publishing their work.
As far as the Montgomery County African American Legacy Trail, the first challenge was making sure no one else in the community was already doing this or a similar project; I didn’t want to step on anyone’s already-in-progress project. In 2017, early in the process, I met with local leaders for the NAACP and African American historians, as well as leaders of organizations who might have been developing something. Not only did I learn that no one was working on a project like I described, but I also received their support.
My second challenge was convincing other professionals and organizations to help me develop this and volunteer their time and services. I communicated with not only entities like Rossview High School’s Academy of Media Arts and Technology program, but also with friends and acquaintances who are historians in the community. There were ups and downs throughout each process, and for example, at first the design students with Rossview’s AMAT program weren’t convinced that I or anyone else working on the project could get it into public locations and maintain enough printed copies for the publication to matter. It was a viable concern, as I had no past track record of a similar project nor did I have anything other than verbal commitments from a few entities in the community—the Customs House Museum, the Montgomery County Archives, and the Montgomery County Public Library as the top three places with a verbal “yes.”
In the end, the first brochure’s design was undertaken by one student’s commitment to the project and the encouragement of Hannah Brooks, the leader of the AMAT program and a teacher at Rossview High. Fast forward and student Kathryn Boyer landed a scholarship at APSU, primarily due to her work on the project. She created the brand that we still use now, years later, in the second edition, and in the online versions. And that second edition, it included the work of several students, about five in total, and four years later was led by my daughter, Zoe Morris, who was a senior at the time and had ended up applying to be in the Rossview High School AMAT program as an eighth grader, the same year Kathryn graduated from the program.
This is one example of the ways in which challenges lead to opportunities in ways that can’t always be anticipated, and they are quite like adventures, which are the most fun when you have great companions. The students and Ms. Brooks are one example. I could tell similar stories about the historians and business professionals who worked with me in the very beginning and have remained dedicated along the way—Terry Morris, my husband, being the most important communicator we had. He became the Director of the CMC African American Legacy Trail and secured a board position and vote with the nonprofit Mt Olive Cemetery Historical Preservation Society, which is the nonprofit that controls the Legacy Trail and its growth now;
Jerome Parchman as the number one historian and researcher, along with the former Director of the Montgomery County Archives, Jill Hastings-Johnson. This was our core team, and without a team, the Legacy Trail wouldn’t exist and it wouldn’t continue to fulfill the original mission of being a living document that will grow and change, as it has continued to do. We are in the process of adding new locations and people now in spring 2026.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Based on the selections you gave, I think that I’ve addressed the Business/Professional side of my life in Thorncraft Publishing and the Clarksville-Montgomery County African American Legacy Trail, as well as the Employee/Team side of both of those entities, so I chose Creative/Artistic as the theme for this question, as I don’t think I’ve adequately addressed my creative work, and it was my first motivator in learning the publishing trade. I wanted to represent myself, and I wanted to choose the other professionals whom I worked with as editors and designers. As an author, I write literary and Southern fiction. (The majority of the work I publish at Thorncraft Publising is literary fiction), and I specialize in stories set in Tennessee. Most of my work includes elements of historical fiction. These stories were born in my families—the various roots of it stretching across seven generations in Tennessee, with many connections to the Revolutionary War and pre-Tennessee statehood.
Traces of my family’s histories are throughout my novels, from the first, Multiple Exposure (2012) to the most recent, Ripe for the Pickin’ (2023).
My second novel, Poke Sallet Queen and the Family Medicine Wheel (2015), is the work I am most proud of writing. I pledged that to my family members, many of whom have since passed on, and they arranged interviews with other family members so that I could understand what I didn’t and capture their voices as they were. Everyone understood that I would fictionalize the stories, and they would not be true as they experienced life, but it would be combined heavily with my own imagination. When the book launch took place at Parnassus Books with my family and friends attending from Gainesboro, the place that had inspired the book and where my family had lived for generations, and friends traveled from out of state, then one of my mentors and professors, the author Barry Kitterman, introduced me and kicked off the book party—it was all surreal and remains a treasured memory. Poke Sallet Queen & the Family Medicine Wheel now has a part 2, Ripe for the Pickin’, and the Family Medicine Wheel series is archived by Vanderbilt University’s Southern Heritage Collection, along with some of my other work. The Family Medicine Wheel is a combination of those family stories, the lore that many children grow up hearing especially in the South, but it also includes elements of the tall tales and the surreal that were a part of many Southern childhoods. I combined that with knowledge of plant and animal life, a love and reverence for nature and the plants and animals native to Tennessee. All of that makes for a unique book series. I do see those same aspects in all of my fictional work, and I think that makes it exciting and unpredictable in ways that connect the reader with the characters as if they are real and less imaginary.
What’s next?
Creatively, I’m completing two of my own writing projects in fiction. One of those, The Changeling Stories, is a compilation of modern day “fairytales” and has been workshopped with beta readers, and I’m adding an artistic element to the book by including surrealist style double exposed photographs, some from a 35 mm film camera and others from an iPhone camera, as a mixed media book. This has been a fun project to develop especially with the advice of a book group that formed after the Clarksville Writers Conference three years ago, and this group of women—Laurina, Cindy, and Anna—have been encouraging and inspiring. My goal is to wrap up the layout and edits this year so that the book publishes in 2027. The second project is the third book in the Family Medicine Wheel series. This one is less complicated than book two and returns to focus on Robin Ballard’s direct family and her continued progress as a musician. I get the most questions about when the next Family Medicine Wheel book will come out and if I’m writing it and how far along am I, etc etc. I love that people care about those characters, but it will most likely be late 2027 or early 2028 before the book is released.
With Thorncraft Publishing, many of the authors are creating exciting work. Whippoorwill Sing (June 2026) by Khristeena Lute is the next book released from Thorncraft. An Appalachian Gothic novel, Whippoorwill Sing, is haunting, captivating, and takes us into a Southern landscape, both the interior and exterior, that makes the book a page-turner. I also like Atlas, the main character, and her desire to save her family’s land though she doesn’t have a clue how, so I’m looking forward to seeing the comments from more readers as the book gets out there.
Amy Wright is allowing Thorncraft to expand our poetry section, and that is an honor. I’ve long admired Amy’s work, so when she brought this project to me, The Opposite Daring: Improvisations on Sappho (2027), I was thrilled and ready to learn more.
Author Jennie Passero is traveling around the world, and her work of mixed genre poetry and essays, The Soulo Traveler (2027), will be timely and shows how much we need to connect with the rest of the world and how critical it is that we honor other cultures, places, and people.
With the Clarksville Montgomery County African American Legacy Trail, the continued expansion of the oral history project in the archives is my priority along with adding new places and people to the online version of the trail, which is at VisitClarksville. We are lucky to have them as hosts and advocates. I continue to conduct research in the hopes of eventually completing a bigger project on Dr. Robert T. Burt and his wife, Emma Williams Burt, and developing a traveling exhibition in connection to the Legacy Trail—that is a shared long term goal with many people who work on the Legacy Trail.
Overall, I want to continue sharing literature and making a difference in my community.
Thank you for this opportunity.
Pricing:
- All the books have different prices from $2.99 for some Kindle versions up to $27.99 for hardback print editions. Available through all major booksellers online and in bookstores.
- The Clarksville Montgomery County African American Legacy Trail is a Free print and online publication. It is distributed throughout Montgomery County, Tennessee, as well as at all State Welcome and Visitors Centers in Tennessee.
- Thorncraft Publishing work-for-hire editing, book design, packaging, and à la carte publishing is $75 per hour.
Contact Info:
- Website: thorncraftpublishing.com
- Instagram: @thorncraftpublishing
- Facebook: Thorncraft Publishing
- Linkedin: Shana Thornton
- Other: Africanamericanlegacies.com
