Sandra Jackson-Opoku in Conversation with Jessi Lewis

Visit the Winchester Book Gallery to hear author and past PBF artist-in-residence Sandra Jackson-Opoku speak about her new book, Savvy Summers and the Sweet Potato Crimes with local author and past PBF artist-in-residence Jessi Lewis!

About the Book

A sparkling debut mystery set on the South Side of Chicago, featuring the quick-witted, unforgettable Savvy Summers, proprietor of a soul food café. When Savvy Summers first opened Essie's soul food café, she never expected her customer-favorite sweet potato pie to become the center of a murder investigation. But when Grandy Jaspers, the 75-year-old neighborhood womanizer, drops dead at table two, she suddenly has more to worry about than just maintaining Essie's reputation for the finest soul food in the Chicagoland area. Even as the police deem Grandy’s death an accident, Savvy quickly finds herself—and her beloved café—in the middle of an entire city’s worth of bad press. Desperate to clear her name and keep her business afloat, Savvy and her snooping assistant manager, Penny Lopés, take it upon themselves to find who really killed Grandy. But with a slimy investor harassing her to sell her name and business, customers avoiding her sweet potato pie like the plague, and her police sergeant ex-husband suddenly back in the picture, will Savvy be able to clear the café’s name and solve Grandy’s murder before it all falls apart? After all, while Savvy always said her sweet potato pie was to die for, she never meant literally.

About Sandra Jackson-Opoku

Sandra Jackson-Opoku is the author of the award-winning novel, The River Where Blood is Born and Hot Johnny and the Women Who Loved Him, an Essence Magazine Bestseller in Hardcover Fiction. She also coedited the anthology Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks. Her fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic works are widely published and produced in Adi Magazine, Midnight & Indigo, Aunt Chloe, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, New Daughters of Africa, Obsidian, Another Chicago Magazine, story South, Lifeline Theatre, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and others. Professional recognition includes a Plentitudes Journal Prize, the Hearst Foundation James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell Arts, a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, an American Library Association Black Caucus Award, a City of Chicago Esteemed Artist Award, the Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award, a Globe Soup Story Award, the Joan Perry Barnes Fellow in Crime Writing at Story knife Writers Retreat and a Pushcart Prize nomination.

About Jessi Lewis

Jessi Lewis is a teacher and writer in rural Virginia. Her fiction was in The Mysterious Bookshop's, The Best Mystery Stories of the Year, 2023 and she received an honorable mention in Best American Short Stories, 2020. She was once an Oxford American Debut Fiction Prize winner and her essays, short stories and poems have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Hopkins Review, Zone 3, Sonora Review, The Pinch and Yemassee, among others. Jessi's novel manuscript was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.