Val Nieman, Upon the Corner of the Moon, in conversation with Christopher Crosbie

At the dawn of the second millennium, two royal Scottish children are swept away from their families—Macbeth to the perilous royal court of his grandfather, and Gruach to the remnants of the goddess-worshipping Picts. Macbeth learns that blood bonds are easily severed while Gruach finds her path only to lose it when she’s summoned back to the patriarchal world. Each struggles with gaining and losing power, guided and misguided by prophecy and politics as their paths converge in a fiery bid for royal succession.

Upon the Corner of the Moon separates literary legend from reality, immersing readers in a story about the real rulers who changed the face of Scotland. Some legends are true, and the truth sometimes becomes a legend—or a lie. This novel masterfully dovetails the Macbeth legend and the truth without sacrificing either.

Val Nieman graduated from West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte. A former professor and journalist, she now teaches creative writing at conferences and workshops. Nieman is the author of several books including To the Bones, a cross-genre mystery and In the Lonely Backwater, an award-winning YA thriller. A North Carolina Arts Council poetry fellow, Nieman has received an NEA creative writing fellowship as well as major grants in West Virginia and Kentucky. Her awards include the Greg Grummer, Nazim Hikmet, and Byron Herbert Reece poetry prizes.

Christopher Crosbie specializes in Shakespeare and other dramatists of the English Renaissance. Interested in the ways philosophy finds expression on the popular stage, Dr. Crosbie has published articles on Shakespeare and his contemporaries in journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Renaissance Papers, Renascence, and Arthuriana, as well as in multiple edited collections. He has received the Martin Stevens Award for Best New Essay in Early Drama Studies from the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society and the J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize from the Shakespeare Association of America.