Mesu Andrews and her husband grew up in Hancock County and graduated from Eastern Hancock High School. She’ll talk with readers about her books at an event Tuesday.
mesuandrews.com
GREENFIELD — Mesu Andrews, an award-winning author from Hancock County, will be back in town and visit with readers at a local event next week.
She’ll be at New Hope Church of the Nazarene from 4-6 p.m. Tuesday. Readers can learn how she does research, find out about her upcoming releases and hear her own personal story.
Mesu Cooley grew up east of Greenfield, attending Charlottesville Elementary School in the years before the Charlottesville and Wilkinson elementaries merged into Eastern Hancock Elementary.
She participated in 4-H, earning ribbons in categories such as foods, home furnishings and personality inprovement. She showed some early interest in writing, such as entering the Riley Festival’s poetry contest when she was in elementary school. A poem submitted for the 1974 festival was published with other contest entries in the Daily Reporter.
She was an honor roll student at Eastern Hancock High School, where she graduated in 1982.
She tells readers on her website that she had at one point rejected God, but “was rescued by an old high school friend, who discovered and shared Jesus with me.”
The classmate was Roy Andrews, whom she had known since third grade. They married in 1984 and have two grown daughters, married with families of their own.
Roy later became a pastor and then a Bible college professor. Along the way Mesu developed a fruitful speaking and teaching ministry, but chronic illness later forced her to slow her pace.
“God never wastes our suffering,” she writes on her website, “and it was during those long hours, days, and weeks in bed that my passion for biblical novels awakened.”
The journey of writing historical fiction has been prolific, yielding more than a dozen novels, and has earned recognition. With her novel “Love Amid the Ashes,” which examines the life of Job through the eyes of a family member, she won the 2012 award for Best New Author during the Evangelicial Christian Publishers Association’s annual Christian Book Awards.
In 2018, her novel “Isaiah’s Daughter” won a Christy Award in the Historical Fiction category. Last month, her newest release, “Feast or Famine,” made the ECPA’s fiction bestseller list.
The Andrews live in North Carolina now but come back to Hancock County several times a year to visit family.
Typically they’re so busy with those reunions, “We seldom connect with friends still in the community,” Mesu Andrews wrote in an email to the Daily Reporter. “So, I was thrilled when Karen Campbell, of the Nameless Creek Literary Club, reached out and offered to host the event at New Hope for anyone interested in hearing more about my books, how I got published, or how I keep biblical TRUTH central within a historical novel.
“Tuesday will be really casual with lots of Q&A. I can’t wait!”
New Hope Church is the Nazarene is east of Greenfield on U.S. 40, in the Stringtown area. The address is 52 N. County Road 500E, Greenfield.
For more information regarding the author event or church, call Pastor Todd Reynolds at (765) 561-7850. To find more information about Mesu Andrews, visit her website at mesuandrews.com.
