AMERICAN BOURBON
When an illegal moonshine still explodes deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the McKinsey family's world-famous (and legal) whiskey, Bourbon Sweet Tea, is threatened. Government agents swarm the area, eager to implicate Sweet Tea founder Caleb McKinsey, who was a notorious bootlegger before going legit. His daughter Brigit is determined to remake the company against her father's will, even if it means dragging her brothers back into outlaw territory.
Reviews for American Bourbon
"Peopled with a cast of characters and a setting out of an early Cormac McCarthy novel, American Bourbon, like a fine bourbon itself, starts out with a burn, working its way through you, then settling into your bones, where memories of the journey, linger." - Jeff Talarigo, author of The Pearl Diver
"A day of reckoning, as thick as the fog in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, looms over the McKinsey clan in this spirited tale of fury, whiskey and grief. And while Jenkins' rendering of Caleb, the abusive and hard-driving patriarch who parlays an illegal moonshining operation into a multi-million dollar company, is harsh, there is grace to be found among his three grown children as they find their way back to one another. Illuminating, nuanced and heartfelt, American Bourbon is the story of how a family evolves, salves its wounds and moves forward." - Laurie Loewenstein, author of Death of a Rainmaker
About Jennifer Jenkins
The novel American Bourbon was published by Northampton House Press in June 2021. Jennifer has also written fiction and nonfiction for NonBinary Review, Up North Lit, Canopy Review, Parentheses Journal, Hippocampus Magazine, and others. She was nominated for a PEN America Short Story Award and earned two honorable mentions for the Fiction Award from Glimmer Train. Jennifer has worked with Manhattan Theatre Club, Sondheim’s Young Playwrights, and the PBS television series Great Performances. As a playwright, her work has been produced in New York and regionally, including an adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. She is the founder and director of a PA Humanities Council multicultural children's theatre featuring original interactive folk tales such as Lon Popo (China), Coyote Trickster (Native America), and The Fairy Wife of Llyn Y Fan Fach (Wales).