Gretchen Cassel Eick

Gretchen Cassel Eick,  incorporates in her writing what she learned from her fourteen years as a foreign and military lobbyist in Washington, DC, her training as a professional historian [PhD in American Studies], and from living and traveling in forty-some countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Central America, and Europe. A writer of award-winning nonfiction books, she decided to try writing fiction in 2014 and produced six novels in ten years and a history/biography, They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans' Story. She lives in Wichita, Kansas with  her husband, the prolific poet Michael Poage, and is currently at work on a historical novel in which her grandmother is a major character.

Eick writes about families like her own whose lives include people of different races and ethnicities. She writes speculative near-future thrillers that feel very close to home, like her 2024 and 2025 novels, Where is Ana Amara? and RESISTANCE!  She writes character-driven novels like Finding Duncan, which features a man struggling with suicidal depression after devastating losses. Dark Crossing features a woman journeying through her grief after her husband’s murder and finding new life discovering her birth father’s Jamaican American extended family. The Set-Up, 1984 follows the true story of four unemployed British young people who fetch and deliver Britain’s largest shipment of drugs and discover they were part of an international set-up that lands them in prison (based on actual events). Maybe Crossings begins in 1960 with the Nashville sit-ins and follows Black and White young participants in the Movement, examining their children’s very different lives and choices.