Judith Austin Mills

The Texas Revolution trilogy by Judith Austin Mills is now complete. The Dove Shall Fly, released in May of 2018, focuses on three revolution participants who cross paths in the days before the battle at San Jacinto. Captain Juan Seguin, a native of San Antonio, and Private James Trezevant of South Carolina are historical figures, and Yarico is again imagined as a member of Macon's Harper family. The backstories of these individuals fold in with their distinct challenges both during and after the revolution of 1836. Those Bones at Goliad, the sequel to How Far Tomorrow, was released in September 2015. The author's second novel continues to tell the stories of ordinary people whose lives were changed forever by the Texas Revolution. In Those Bones at Goliad, the focus shifts to the few American volunteers who manage to escape the mass executions of Palm Sunday, 1836. No one in Texas at the time of Goliad and Refugio emerges from the brief independence war unscathed. The author counts her fascination with Texas history as a relatively new obsession. Mills moved to Texas from up north when she was ten and remembers that it took many years for her to adjust to a landscape lacking traditional seasons. She wonders, though, if relocation to Texas is what taught her to observe incremental change and to appreciate understated beauty. Ancestors who came to Texas with the Georgia Battalion keep inspiring her. Judith Austin Mills earned her MA in English at UT Austin, with a concentration in Creative Writing. She was awarded runner-up status for the only CrWr graduate fellowship at the time, and her short story won First Place in Analecta. More stories from her collection Lost Autumn Blues have appeared in other literary journals. Her novel Tripping Home won the Writers' League of Texas mainstream manuscript contest in 2001. Since 2010, she's immersed herself in historical fiction, with How Far Tomorrow making its debut in 2011, Those Bones at Goliad in 2015, and The Dove Shall Fly in 2018. Her poetry sequence Accidental Joy(2014) garnered a Pushcart nomination. A retired Austin Community College adjunct, Judith Austin Mills has been writing and teaching in central Texas for over thirty-five years.