Kimi Cunningham Grant Books in Order

If you want the clearest entry point: These Silent Woods → The Nature of Disappearing
If you like small-town suspense: Fallen Mountains
If you want her nonfiction first: Silver Like Dust
If you want publication order: Silver Like Dust → Fallen Mountains → These Silent Woods → The Nature of Disappearing

Kimi Cunningham Grant grew up in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, and she has said the woods behind her parents’ house were one of her first real classrooms. That outdoor life stayed with her. In her books, forests, rivers, ridgelines, and small towns are never just scenery. They shape what people fear, what they remember, and how far they think they can run.

She studied English at Messiah College, graduating in 2002, and later did graduate work in English at Bucknell University. She also studied at Oxford University. Before her novels found a wide audience, she taught at a private school in State College, Pennsylvania, wrote poems and essays, and built her writing life piece by piece instead of all at once.

Her first book, Silver Like Dust, came from family history. In it, Grant looks back at the experience of her Japanese American grandparents during World War II, especially her grandmother, Obaachan, who spent years in government camps, including Heart Mountain in Wyoming. The memoir is also about Grant herself, a girl growing up in rural Pennsylvania who wanted badly to fit in and had to circle back, years later, to understand the parts of her heritage she once pushed away.

Then she turned to fiction.

That shift makes sense when you look at the questions that drive her work. Grant has said that the beginning of a book is exciting for her because it is where she discovers her characters’ histories, secrets, fears, and the things they are capable of, both good and bad. Her novels are full of people trying to protect a life they have made, only to find that the past does not stay politely buried.

Fallen Mountains, her first novel, brings those concerns home to central Pennsylvania. What starts as the disappearance of Transom Shultz opens into an old crime, strained friendships, and the damage caused when money, land, and loyalty collide. Readers who like small-town suspense tend to notice how grounded the book feels. The mystery matters, but so do the farms, the grudges, and the pressure of living where everyone knows more than they say.

Her readership grew even more with These Silent Woods. The setup is simple and unsettling: Cooper and his daughter Finch have spent years hidden away in a remote Appalachian cabin, living close to the land and far from everyone else. The novel blends survival story, family drama, and suspense, and it shows one of Grant’s favorite tensions, the pull between safety and isolation. That same feel carries into The Nature of Disappearing, where an Idaho wilderness guide named Emlyn is pushed back toward an old friendship and an old love when a woman goes missing.

Place comes first.

That is true of her life as well as her fiction. Grant has written early in the morning while her house was still quiet, homeschooled her sons, and taught fiction writing as an adjunct at Juniata College. She is also a two-time winner of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize in Poetry and a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship in creative nonfiction. Before the thrillers, there was poetry. Before the wide readership, there was steady work.

She now lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, sons, and golden retriever, and she still spends plenty of time outside. That feels like the right ending point for a writer whose books keep returning to woods, weather, and the stubborn question of whether a person can ever really disappear. Maybe not. But Grant knows how to make readers follow them deep into the trees to find out.