Elizabeth Cochrane isn't crazy; she has a secret. She is really the investigative reporter, Nellie Bly, infiltrating the notorious Blackwell's Asylum for Women to write an expose.! That does sound crazy though...

A Feigned Madness is the fictionalized history of the birth of the famous Nellie Bly who rocked the newspaper world with her investigative reporting and fearless exposes. Tonya Mitchell has written a meticulously researched account of Nellie Bly's first major expose into the mistreatment of asylum patients. She was the first to break the gender barrier in the cutthroat world of the Gilded Age newspapers and would forge a legacy for female reporters to follow.

We will be having a hybrid author discussion with a few seats available in store plus a Zoom broadcast. Please RSVP for either ticket here.

The author will be joined by Dolly McCoy of the Apollo Area Historical Society. Elizabeth Cochrane lived for a number of years near Apollo, PA. Dolly will be providing another historical context for the main Elizabeth Cochrane/Nellie Bly.

Tonya Mitchell received her BA in journalism from Indiana University. Her fiction has appeared in the Copperfield Review, Words Undone, and the Front Porch Review, as well as in various anthologies, including Furtive Dalliance, Welcome to Elsewhere, and Glimmer and Other Stories and Poems, for which she won the Cinnamon Press award in fiction. She is a self-professed Anglophile and is obsessed with all things relating to the Victorian period. She is a member of the Historical Novel Society North America and resides in Cincinnati, Ohio, with her husband and three wildly energetic sons.

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You can pre-order your copy of Feigned Madness here!