Kim Michele Richardson Books in Order

If you want the full Book Woman story: The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek → The Book Woman's Daughter → The Mountains We Call Home
If you like Southern family mysteries: Liar's Bench → The Sisters of Glass Ferry
If you want a coming-of-age Appalachian novel: GodPretty in the Tobacco Field
If you want her true story first: The Unbreakable Child
If you're reading with younger kids: Junia, The Book Mule of Troublesome Creek

Kim Michele Richardson was born in Kentucky, and Kentucky is the ground under all of her books. She often says the state is home and its people are her people. That feeling runs through everything she writes, from eastern mountain hollers to western backroads and river towns, with a close eye for local history, speech, labor, and everyday pride.

Her early life was rough. Richardson spent her first decade in a rural Kentucky orphanage, later endured poverty and homelessness as a teenager, and has been open about how those experiences changed the way she sees the world. When she writes about people who are ignored, underestimated, or pushed to the side, it does not feel borrowed. It feels lived in.

She told that story most directly in her memoir, The Unbreakable Child, which recounts her childhood at Saint Thomas-Saint Vincent Orphan Asylum and the long aftermath of abuse. The book also looks at the search for justice and the much slower search for forgiveness. Richardson has said that all earnings from the memoir go to survivors and underserved people.

Pain is part of her work, but it is never the whole story.

Before her biggest bestseller arrived, Richardson built a body of Kentucky fiction that already showed what matters to her. Liar's Bench follows a seventeen-year-old girl in 1972 who digs into her mother's suspicious death and a town's buried racial violence. GodPretty in the Tobacco Field turns to a poverty-struck Appalachian community in 1969, where a young girl named RubyLyn wants a bigger life than the one handed to her. In The Sisters of Glass Ferry, a vanished twin and a clue from the river pull a bourbon-town family back into old lies.

Her breakout novel was The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. Richardson spent years researching the Pack Horse Library Project and the history behind Kentucky's blue-skinned families, then built the book around Cussy Mary Carter, a librarian who carries books into remote mountain communities during the Depression. It became the novel many readers first associate with her name, and it also found a big life in book clubs, classrooms, and community reads. The book brings together several things Richardson does especially well: stubborn heroines, hard country, forgotten history, and the idea that reading can be practical help, shelter, and dignity all at once.

She stayed with that world in The Book Woman's Daughter, which shifts the focus to Honey Lovett, and again in The Mountains We Call Home, which returns to Cussy in a later chapter of her life. Together, those books widen the story from mountain routes and one-room homes to prisons, cities, and broader fights over belonging and basic freedom. Richardson also brought the series to younger readers with Junia, The Book Mule of Troublesome Creek, a picture book that gives Cussy's sure-footed mule her own spotlight.

Books, in Richardson's world, are never just books.

They are proof that someone showed up, and that idea carries into her life off the page too. Richardson founded Shy Rabbit, a writers residency, and started Courthouses Reading Across Kentucky & Beyond, a literacy effort that places Little Free Libraries in courthouses. Eastern Kentucky University awarded her an honorary Doctor of Humanities in 2024, and in 2025 she was included in the Kentucky Women Remembered exhibit in the state capitol. She lives in Kentucky with her family, is married to a woodturner, and has written with real affection about their adopted dogs and her longtime interest in photography.