Catherine Hughes

From my earliest days, I was the kid who always had a book in her hands.  There was something so magical about turning a page and crossing a threshold into a brand new world.  Myths and folktales, stories of kings and queens, tales of witches and haunted castles, adventures of settlers and explorers--I loved them all, devouring one series after another, nudged by the sway of my interest.

 

When it came to writing, the first time I put my thoughts out there for the public eye to see coincided with my family’s move from the Bronx, NY out to “the country”--Long Island of the 1970s.  The day my parents brought us children to the house, I remember thinking how weird it was that no other family lived upstairs as they had done in our former apartment building.  That summer, I decided to put out my own newspaper about events that were happening on the block.  Pulling information from the three friends who lived on my street and knocking on the doors of a few kindly neighbors, I had enough material to fill out a weekly newsletter.  For 50 cents, I would get 10 copies made at the library and rush home to carefully fold and place them into mailboxes.  My writing career didn’t last very long though.  Once the summer sun gave way to the shortened days of autumn and the leaves went from gold to brown to dust, I lacked the tenacity to brave the changes, preferring to stay inside and cozy up with a book rather than go out into the chilled twilight to get the latest scoop.   

 

I do look back fondly upon those days, especially the excitement I felt about gathering information and adding my own sense of flair (and even a bit of fiction) to it before putting it on the page. Even though over the years in between, I’ve written hundreds of lessons, lectures, and speeches, that passion to tell a great story never really went away.  A trip to Urquhart castle on the banks of Loch Ness gave me the courage to tap into that love once again.  

 

In Silence Cries the Heart was recognized as a Finalist in Fiction-Romance for the American Writing Awards, Honorable Mention in Historical-Romance for the Coffee Pot Book Club Awards, a Top Ten Finalist for Book Shelf Awards in Fiction, Honorable Mention in General Fiction for the New England Book Festival Awards, and a Semifinalist in Romance for the 2023 Indies Today Award. In addition, the Historical Fiction Company gave it a five star rating and "Highly Recommended" status (see below), and in the HFC’s 2023 Book of the Year Contest, the book was named winner of the Silver Medal in the category of Historical Fiction Romance.  Most recently, In Silence Cries the Heart was a Finalist for Readers Choice Book Awards and won the Gold/1st Place award in the 2024 Literary Titan and Feathered Quill Book Awards Program for the Romance category.   

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My second novel, Therein Lies the Pearl, is in the works and has been short-listed by the Historical Novel Society in their First Chapters Competition.