Historical novelist Ken Yoder Reed ’66 will return to Eastern Mennonite University Thursday, Feb. 16, for a Writers Read event at Common Grounds coffeehouse at 6:30 p.m. The event is open to the public. A freewill donation will be taken.
Reed, who lives in San Jose, California, recently published his third novel, Both My Sons (Masthof Press, 2016). He has also written Mennonite Soldier and He Flew Too High.
Both My Sons tells the story of Klaus Greenywalt, a Swiss-German immigrant to Lebanon County, around the year 1755. Faced with a number of personal struggles, his issues become magnified by the outbreak of the French and Indian War.
In October 2016, he returned to Pennsylvania to lead an historic tour of sites portrayed in Both My Sons. Although the central character in the novel is a “composite of several Pennsylvania pioneers,” Reed informed potential tour-goers, the main events and places in the novel are real, including Benjamin Franklin, “Fighting Parson” John Elder, and John Harris.
The novel has been favorably reviewed by John Landis Ruth, Carolyn Wenger of the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society, Commander Chuck Faust of the Pennsylvania State Regiment of Colonial Re-enacters, and bestselling author Phyllis Pellman Good.
Reed comes from a Mennonite background in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. He attended Mennonite schools, including Lancaster Mennonite High School. At Eastern Mennonite College, he earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature. He also attended the Japanese Language Institute in Sapporo, Japan, and completed alternative service as an English teacher there.
He has also been a freelancer for Mennonite publications in Lancaster. In 1991, Reed made the move to San Francisco where he founded an international business of high-tech firms. He now has a blended family that includes his wife, Patricia, and six adult children.