By Emmie Brooks
Photographs by Jacklyn Morgan
Front Street in Beaufort moves at an unhurried pace. The sidewalks are wide and worn smooth, shaded by live oaks that still hold the day’s warmth. Kristy Woodson Harvey’s house sits a few blocks in, a white, early-1900s home that has outlived trends by never chasing them. A low white gate wraps the front yard, creating a small, contained world where Salt, the family’s 4-year-old dog, keeps watch, alert and content in equal measure. The setting suits a writer who pays attention to how people move through their days, and how towns do, too.
In this town, Harvey explains, milestones rarely stay private. When a middle school basketball team goes undefeated, Beaufort doesn’t simply congratulate them; it organizes a parade. Cars line the streets. Neighbors show up. What might pass quietly elsewhere becomes, here, a shared event. It’s easy to imagine a writing life taking shape in a place like this. And from this place, observant and unhurried, her stories take form.
The mornings set the tone. Harvey begins each day with a short yoga session, a ritual that stretches her body and clears her mind. Only after that does she turn to her writing.
“Then, the very first thing I do is my words for the day. Whatever manuscript I’m working on, I come into my office and try to write around 2,000 words before I check texts or emails,” she says. “Once you get into all that, my intention feels fractured.”
Her approach is methodical, shaped as much by experience as by discipline. On days with an empty calendar and a quiet house, she can write 5,000 to 6,000 words, carried along by the story as it unfolds. Harvey doesn’t outline her novels; her characters and plots reveal themselves gradually, a process she describes as both surprising and thrilling. “Being an author for this long has taught me that a ‘good writing day’ just means getting to the page,” she says.
Even amid podcasts, web shows, tours and multiple books a year, she keeps her mornings sacred. “I try to write with the door closed, then edit with the door open,” she says. “But I do think about my readers a lot, especially when I’m coming up with ideas.”
Beaufort itself provides a continual source of inspiration. Its mix of historic charm and quirky modernity is evident everywhere, from the waterline to the streets.
“The other day I took a bunch of my son’s friends to Royal James Cafe,” Harvey recalls. “They’re playing pool, we’re ordering, and I look over, and there’s a guy at the bar with . . . birds. On the bar. On his shoulders. I thought, this is going in a book. I don’t know where, but he has to be in a book.”
Her fascination with people stretches back to childhood. Harvey’s first writing gig came in high school, covering local events for her hometown newspaper. “My first story was about garden games. So, I wrote about an Elvis-shaped squash, things like that,” she says. “I got to meet the family, interview them. That’s how I fell in love with writing.”
After journalism school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s degree in English from East Carolina University, Harvey graduated into the 2008 recession and took a position in finance. Story ideas persisted, however, and she started writing on the side. Winning a writing contest eventually led to a book deal. “The thing that’s supposed to find you, will just find you,” she says.
That sense of discovery carries into Summer State of Mind, her 13th novel, which is set to release in early May. The book grew from a small, lingering idea rather than a grand plan. Years ago, Harvey read a newspaper article about a neonatal intensive care unit nurse who adopted an abandoned baby. The story stayed with her. Later, conversations with friends in similar lines of work filled in emotional gaps. For Harvey, that persistence is a signal.
“I know it’s time to write a novel when I can’t stop thinking about it. It just will not let me go,” she says. “This sounds crazy, but I’ll start to hear the voices of the characters in my head. They start to take shape for me.”
At the center of Summer State of Mind is Daisy, an NICU nurse who comes to a small coastal town looking for simplicity, only to have her life upended when an abandoned baby arrives at the hospital. It’s a premise rooted in improbability, especially in a place like coastal North Carolina, where everyone knows everyone else. The town’s reaction matters as much as the event itself.
“This is something that would never happen in a town like Cape Carolina; it would be like if someone brought an abandoned baby into the hospital in Carteret County, people would think there’s no possible world in which we did not know who had this baby,” she says. “The town is falling apart because, how could this possibly happen?”
The novel marks a shift in Harvey’s storytelling. In many of her earlier books, readers meet women after their lives have fallen apart. This time, the unraveling happens on the page. “I don’t normally let you see them fall apart,” she says. “But with this, you watch in real time as Daisy ruins her own life.”
Harvey is drawn to those gray areas, to moments when there is no clear right answer and every decision carries consequences. Real life, she says, rarely offers clean lines, and her characters aren’t meant to either.
Longtime readers will recognize familiar faces in Summer State of Mind. Two characters from Under the Southern Sky reappear, including Mason, a former professional baseball player whose life spirals out of control after an injury ended his career. Once a secondary figure, Mason steps back into the story with more room to grow.
Another returning presence is Aunt Tilley, a character who has stayed with readers since Under the Southern Sky was published in 2021. “I still get emails from people about Aunt Tilley. She really stuck with readers,” Harvey says. “They wanted to know more about her, and honestly, so did I.”
The instinct to revisit familiar people and places extends beyond Summer State of Mind and into Harvey’s most enduring fictional world, Peachtree Bluff. Set for release in September, Falling for Peachtree Bluff will be the fifth novel in the series, bringing readers back to the North Carolina coastal town where they first met a group of women learning how to hold each other through change.
“I’m excited, but there’s definitely work to do,” Harvey says. “It’s like, ‘Yay, we were on Good Morning America, but also my proofreads are due tomorrow.’”
And the stories she’s telling won’t stay on the pages for long; several have found a life on screen. Summer of Songbirds is in development with Hulu, while A Happier Life is moving forward with Amazon MGM.
“I’m hoping to spend a lot of time in L.A. in 2026 or 2027,” she says. “We’re really excited, there’s just a lot of great things going on.”
Several of her other books, including Beach House Rules and Under the Southern Sky, have also been optioned, and she serves as executive producer on all of her projects, guiding script approvals and providing creative input.
Even as her stories reach screens and new audiences, the heart of Harvey’s work remains in the towns and characters she knows best. From the pages of Summer State of Mind to the coming adventures of Falling for Peachtree Bluff, from familiar faces to new characters, readers have a front-row seat to every page, every parade and every unfolding life she chooses to share. And in the end, every story returns to a place that feels like home.