Our Story
We named our press for a quiet, wooded street in Georgia where ferns grow along stone paths and deer wander through the shade. The day we bought our house there, a hawk was waiting to greet us. We named him Steve. That spirit runs through our books, too: rooted in the South, attentive to the past, and full of the people and places that shaped us.
Our own story began in the newsroom of The Albany Herald, where we were two young reporters chasing deadlines and, briefly, each other. Life pulled us in different directions, but neither of us forgot. Twenty years later we found each other again, married in 2009, and soon moved to the Atlanta area to teach high school, Bill in history and government and Phyllis in English. Between us, we gave more than fifty years to Georgia classrooms. That early newsroom romance found its way into Bill’s John Maynard and Abby Sinclair thrillers.
We’re retired now, with four grown children and a shared love of travel, history, and music. We’ve been so busy writing that we’ve done very little to tell anyone about our books. Not long ago, Phyllis asked Bill how many he had written. “Twelve, I think,” he said. It is sixteen. Add Phyllis’s two, and we have eighteen books between us: memoir and poetry, Southern history and biography, and a seven-book thriller series. Kari Glen Press is how we’re finally sharing them.
Phyllis McCoy Lightle
Phyllis McCoy Lightle was raised in Alabama’s cotton-mill culture. She is the granddaughter of a woman who got on a bus in 1945 and left the man who beat her, and the sixteen-times great-granddaughter of a Queen of Scots who had no such option.
A first-generation college graduate, Phyllis earned a master’s degree in English, worked as a newspaper reporter, and spent decades teaching writing and literature in college and high school classrooms. The journalist in her never left. She is drawn to the documented fact, the named woman, and the story that can be verified and still break your heart.
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Phyllis went into her backyard, set a pile of pinecones on fire, and cried out in rage. Then she sat down to write. From the Castle to the Cotton Mill traces ten centuries of her maternal line, from medieval queens to Quaker colonists to Southern mill workers. It asks how women learn what to believe about themselves, and how those lessons travel through generations: Be good. Be small. Be grateful. Be sweet. It is her second book, following the poetry collection Chasing Hemingway.
She and her husband, author Bill Lightle, live outside Atlanta, a short drive from the unmarked grave of her ancestor Nancy Whaley. They have stood together at the Bayeux Tapestry, Balvenie Castle, and the Legacy Museum in Montgomery. When Phyllis needs to stand at a monument until the light disappears, Bill waits for her. For a woman writing about what a thousand years of women were denied, that turns out to be part of the story, too.
Bill Lightle
Bill Lightle was nine years old in 1966 when his family moved from Gas City, Indiana, to Albany, Georgia, where his father had taken a job building aircraft. He came of age reading newspapers and listening to his father and his friends tell stories of the Great Depression and World War II. Those stories gave him a lifelong love of history and politics, and a good ear for how people talk.
After earning a political science degree from Georgia Southwestern College in 1980, Bill went to work as a general assignment reporter for The Albany Herald, where he met a young reporter named Phyllis McCoy. He went on to write for three other Southeastern newspapers, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, before beginning a 29-year career teaching history and government. Through all of it, he kept writing.
Bill is the author of sixteen books. His nine works of nonfiction include Mill Daddy, the memoir Race & Politics, and his latest, The New Justice and Other Spirit Animals. His seven-book John Maynard and Abby Sinclair mystery series, beginning with Dead River, has been praised by readers for stories “told with grace and understanding.” The newsroom romance behind it isn’t entirely fiction.
Today he and Phyllis live in the Georgia countryside outside Atlanta, with dogs who run the house and a cat named Nigel who runs the dogs. Be sure to check out Phyllis’s memoir, From the Castle to the Cotton Mill, and her poetry collection, Chasing Hemingway. He’ll tell you she’s a wonderful poet.