Covered Buttons

Covered Buttons (Mercer University Press, 2026) is the debut novel by Arkansas writer Stephanie Saunders. Set in rural northern Arkansas in the 1930s, Covered Buttons is a compelling bildungsroman—a story of growing up and learning about the adult world, beginning to decipher its mysteries and find one’s own place in it.

The novel follows seventeen-year-old Thea Everson as she learns the ways of womanhood in the rural South. Thea has lost her mother, and a new stepmother is stepping into the picture. Much of that relationship orbits around domestic daily life. For instance, Thea teaches her somewhat inept stepmother the ways of sewing flour sacks into a fashionable dress.

Thea meets Betsy Smith through her stepmother. Betsy is an Ozarks renegade, the source of gossip and scandal. Thea does not know for sure if Betsy is involved with bootlegging, but wagging tongues have it that Betsy is not exactly compatible with respectable domestic life. Eventually Thea learns why: Betsy is a “contraception smuggler,” evangelizing birth control to the poor, disenfranchised women of the Ozarks foothills. Through Betsy, Thea peers into the mysteries of sex and parenthood—a glimmer of the adult world. However, Betsy’s activities put in motion a series of plot developments that will end in tragedy.

Covered Buttons displays Saunders’s careful attention to historical detail. She was inspired to write the novel after coming across Marianne Leung’s dissertation, “‘Better Babies’: The Arkansas Birth Control Movement in the 1930s.” Much of the novel is shaped by the letters Saunders found in Leung’s study, from real Ozarks women writing desperately for help so that their families would not continue to grow when they already struggled to make ends meet. She also worked closely with Ozarks historian Brooks Blevins to guide her research on the period. As a result, the novel is full of historical and cultural details that provide mood and setting for Thea’s story.

Covered Buttons was named a 2026 “Arkansas Gem” by the Arkansas Center for the Book at the Arkansas State Library.

Saunders was born in Batesville (Independence County) and raised in Salem (Fulton County). She graduated summa cum laude from Lyon College before moving to Kentucky to complete a PhD in Spanish, where she established a research profile in fashion studies. From there, her travels widened throughout Latin America before she took her first faculty position at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. She returned to Arkansas in 2022 to take a faculty position at Lyon College.

For additional information:
Beal, Wesley. “Stephanie Saunders’ Debut Novel Maps Arkansas’s Grassroots Birth Control Movement.” Arkansas Times, April 6, 2026. https://arktimes.com/food-and-culture/2026/04/06/stephanie-saunders-debut-novel-maps-arkansass-grassroots-birth-control-movement (accessed September 16, 2026).

Saunders, Stephanie. Covered Buttons. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2026.

Wesley Beal
Lyon College