Wild Walt and the Rock Creek Gang

The anonymous author discovers the most astonishing secret in American literature, complete with priceless manuscripts, in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. Walt Whitman's shocking secret story and the evidence that proves it have been kept under wraps ever since the war-torn summer of 1864. Ezra and June, a former slave and a poetry-obsessed white woman, are in love, hidden away in a shack. Their chance encounter with the despondent Walt Whitman, at that time a failed, little-known poet, sends Whitman on his way to greatness and births a still-thriving secret legacy that grows to encompass poets and writers across time and continents--the peerless Rock Creek Gang.

Lured into the hidden world of the vast, modern-day park by its zany tribe of misfits, the narrator weaves his madcap adventure of discovery along with his telling of Whitman's secret story to conjure up an American saga: the horrors of slavery and war and the story of two families, one black and one white, bound together by Whitman's long-cherished secrets and the saving grace of poetry.

In the present day, the heroes of this vividly imagined novel, a ne'er-do-well booklover obsessed with John Keats and a wizened, homeless black man who recites Langston Hughes, connive to reveal Whitman's closely guarded secrets and the strange, hidden world of Rock Creek Park. At stake is Whitman's true legacy and the fate of the narrator and his fellow Rock Creek secret-keepers.

The novel will delight and surprise non-poetry fans as well as poetry enthusiasts (poetry is experiencing a comeback!), particularly fans of Whitman and the Rock Creek Gang who share his secret legacy: John Keats, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, Richard Brautigan, Roberto Bolaño and Langston Hughes. The first-ever novel set in Rock Creek Park will also appeal to fiction readers among the two million annual visitors to the country's largest urban park.

Wild Walt and the Rock Greek Gang is a modern-day Dead Poets Society turned on its precious head. A diverse cast of misfit under-represented characters, not at a prep school but in a gritty, hidden world smack dab in the middle of Washington, D.C., give it the same broad appeal--the power of poetry brought to life for general non-poetry readers. It is a modern American version of literary discovery novels like bestsellers Possession and People of the Book.