Gallonwood Press

Regina Lynn Gallon was born in East Texas — in Nacogdoches, the oldest town in Texas, rooted in Shelby County and the Freedom Colonies that her ancestors built after emancipation on land they earned through survival, labor, and an unbroken determination to remain. She grew up in the shadow of that history, knowing that the names in her family tree stretched back through the domestic slave trade, across the American South, and further still — to the Motherland, to people who were stolen before they could leave a record of their own.

That knowledge became her life's work. Regina Lynn Gallon is the founder of Gallonwood Press and the author of The Plight of the Captive, a twenty-book series of literary historical fiction that follows the journey of enslaved people from the African continent through the domestic slave trade of the United States — from the auction blocks of Charleston to the cotton fields of Alabama, down the Red River corridor into Louisiana and East Texas. She is also the author of Roots in Red River Country, a genealogical history nearly 75,000 words deep, documenting what the census records, the deed books, and the freedmen's bureau files preserved when the people themselves were not permitted to leave their own testimony.

Her mission is singular: to tell the history of her ancestors — from the Motherland to the slave ship, from the domestic trade to the Freedom Colony — in every register available to her. As documented history. As literary fiction. As ancestral memory that refuses to stay in a footnote. Every book she publishes begins with the names the ledger recorded and asks the question the ledger never answered: what was it to be a human being inside this?

She writes under her legal name. She writes with Nacogdoches and her ancestors in her heart.