Kimi Cunningham Grant Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Kimi Cunningham Grant is a mystery and memoir author from Pennsylvania that is best known for her debut fiction work “Fallen Mountains.”
Her debut work was a memoir that told the story of her Japanese-American grandparents and their life living at the Heart Mountain internment camp during World War II. “Fallen Mountains,” her second novel, is a literary mystery that documents the tension brought about by fracking in a small town in Pennsylvania.
Cunningham is an award winning author who got the creative nonfiction Arts fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council and the Memorial Prize in Poetry by Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg.

Her poems and essays have been featured in Whitefish Review, Fathom, Grasslimb, Literary Mama, Apalachee Review, RATTLE, Tar River Poetry and Poet Lore.
In her earlier years, she earned an English degree from Messiah and then went on to teach at a private school in Pennsylvania. She would then go to Bucknell University as an English major.

She now is a teacher at Juanita College in Pwebnnsylvannia, even though she loves to homeschool her two children aged nine and six. She currently writes, teaches and lives in Pennsylvania.

Even though Kimi Cunningham Grant always liked to dream of becoming an author, it would take a lot of time for her to achieve her dream. Her first work was “Silver Like Dust,” which was narrative creative nonfiction.

Since she had written a book before, she believed the leap to fiction would not be that hard. But since she had very little training in writing fiction, it was a huge shock. This coupled with the fact that she became a mother during this process meant that getting published took a very long time.

Very early on, she was drawn to the idea of land disputes given that she tends to love places deeply and get attached to them. When she first started writing “Fallen Mountains,” she was just curious as to how far anyone would go in protecting land they deeply cherished.

Once she started writing, this blossomed into a question of whether people that would be deemed good would do terrible things when under specific pressure. Could people be pushed to do things they would never think they were capable of? She also went on a tangent to explore how people try to get away from their pasts.

Kimi Cunningham Grant usually writes very early in the mornings before her children wake up. As a Christian, her faith to a large extent shapes how she interacts in the world and who she is.

She has also been influenced in her writing by the many books she has read over the years. However, she does not have specific inspirations that motivated her to become an author. Still, she remembers reading and enjoying Elizabeth George Speare, Susan Cooper and Avi as a kid.

It was during this time that she started entertaining the idea of becoming an author in adulthood. As an adult reader, some of the works she loves to read are from the likes of Marilynne Robinson, Delia Owens, Emily St. John Mandel and Tom Franklin.

When she is not reading or writing, she tends to be a very outdoorsy person who loves kayaking, hiking, being out in the woods and biking as she feels most alive when she is outside.

“Silver Like Dust,” the first book by Kimi Cunningham Grant, is the story of Obaachan who is Kimi Grant’s grandmother. At the opening of the novel, she is introduced as a woman that loved to sip her tea by the fire, indulgently listen to the stories her husband tells, and prepare sushi for the family.
Kimi had always had a mixed relationship with her Japanese heritage and thinks her grandmother had something to do with it. Growing up an American in Pennsylvania, she wanted to fit in so much and spurned her grandfather’s attempt to teach her Japanese or eat the cuisine.

But she had always been fascinated by the fact that the proud yet gentle had once been imprisoned alongside more than 100,000 other Japanese Americvns for five years. Her grandmother never spoke of those years while for Kimi’s mother, this is something she talked about in whispers.

It was a source of shame and Kimi always wondered what had happened to the then young Obaachan and thousands of other children, women and men like her. Obaachan had met her husband while still interned and watched her mother die a prisoner.

Kimi Cunningham Grant’s novel “These Silent Woods” is the story of a man named Cooper and Finch, his young daughter. For more than eight years, they have lived with no family, electricity or any kind of connection with the outside world.

They live in a remote cabin high up in the Appalachian forest and this is just how Cooper wants to live since he has too much to hide. All Finch knows is what has been gleaned from the brutal code of life in the remote region she calls home and the many books that fill her home shelf.

Slowly but surely, she has been pushing back against the isolated life her father has given her. But she is still haunted by the many secrets from the past. The only people aware of their existence are Kake who is an old friend of Cooper’s, and Scotland, a local hermit.

The former visits them every winter, coming with supplies and food. But he fails to turn up this year which sets off a chain of events that shows that they have been living in a very precarious situation all along. Suddenly, their once safe haven has blurry boundaries.

Things get even more precarious when a stranger wanders across the boundary and Finch’s obsession with the strange woman leaves them even more exposed.

“Fallen Mountains” by Kimi Cunningham Grant is a story set in Fallen Mountains, a small town in rural Pennsylvania. The lead is Transom Shultz who goes missing soon after he arrives back in his hometown.

The sheriff, a man named Red, is afraid that Transom’s crime, which had been committed nearly eighteen years earlier, could resurface putting his job in jeopardy. Red had been involved in the coverup and could have something to do with the man going missing.

Meanwhile, Laney is determined to do everything in her power to prevent Transom from blurting out some careless words that could jeopardize their budding relationship.

Transom had come back a changed man and immediately bought the family farm that once belonged to Chase, his former best friend. He had then logged the farm and leased the mineral rights to some shale fracking company.

As the search for the missing Transom heats up, the tangled and dark histories of the inhabitants unfold and each needs to decide whether they will move beyond the past or live under its brutal weight.