Photo courtesy HarperCollins.com At the end of spring break, I put my beach-y romance novels back on the shelf and reached for an entirely different read. “Free...

Katy Simpson Smith seems like the best kind of optimist. Driven from a young age by a love of the South and her people, she initially sought a career in history, attending Mount Holyoke College, earning a PhD in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and going on to pen the well-received, “We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South 1750-1835.” Smith...