Leesa Cross-Smith Books in Order

Leesa Cross-Smith grew up in Kentucky and still lives there with her husband, her high school sweetheart, and their two children. She calls herself a homemaker, artist, and writer, and that mix of home life, close relationships, music, and place runs through much of her work.

Her route to fiction was not a straight line. Before she focused more fully on stories, Cross-Smith wrote obituaries for a local newspaper and wrote fiction when she could. In an earlier interview, she described how hard it was to find reading and writing time while raising young children.

She kept coming back to stories.

Cross-Smith also co-founded and edited the online literary journal WhiskeyPaper with her husband, Loran. She has said that she loves reading stories as much as writing them, and that she wanted the journal to offer accessible fiction with heart and a little light in it.

Her first book, Every Kiss a War, arrived in 2014. The short story collection follows people falling in and out of love, carrying hurt, wanting connection, and trying to make sense of desire. It was a finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and it was nominated for the PEN Open Book Award.

Then came Whiskey & Ribbons, her 2018 debut novel. Set in Louisville, it follows Evi after her husband, police officer Eamon, is killed, leaving her to care for their newborn son with help from Eamon's adopted brother, Dalton. The book moves among three voices and makes room for grief, family loyalty, parenthood, and the uneasy possibility of starting over. It later received the 2019 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Literary Fiction.

Her later books keep changing the setting and setup while staying interested in people at emotional crossroads. So We Can Glow collects stories about girls and women, friendship, obsession, fantasy, grief, and bad decisions. This Close to Okay brings together a recently divorced therapist and a stranger she finds on a bridge during a rainy Kentucky night. In Half-Blown Rose, a woman in Paris has to decide what she wants from a marriage that no longer feels whole.

Love is rarely simple in these books.

With Goodbye Earl, Cross-Smith turns to four longtime friends in a small Southern town who rally around one another when one of them is harmed. Her 2025 novel, As You Wish, follows three young American au pairs in Seoul whose wishes at a waterfall begin to reshape their lives. Across novels and stories, readers will find complicated relationships, friendship, music, food, travel, faith, memory, and women trying to name what they need.

Cross-Smith's work has earned several notable honors along the way. She was longlisted for the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize and the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Still, the through line is personal: she writes about people who are lonely, hopeful, attracted to the wrong person, loyal to their friends, or simply trying to find a softer place to land.