HCC's Big Read: The Last Beekeeper
HCC's Big Read: The Last Beekeeper
Hagerstown Community College is happy to announce its fourth annual Big Read initiative, open to all students, faculty, staff, and the community. The 2025 Big Read is a novel by Julie Carrick Dalton, entitled, The Last Beekeeper.
Meet the Author at HCC
HCC will host a Big Read event with author Julie Carrick Dalton, on Thursday, October 2, 2025, at 10 a.m., in the Kepler Theater. Guests will hear from the author and have a chance for a free book signing.
About the Book
It’s been more than a decade since the world has come undone, and Sasha Severn has returned to her childhood home with one goal in mind—find the mythic research her father, the infamous Last Beekeeper, hid before he was incarcerated. There, Sasha is confronted with a group of squatters who have claimed the quiet, idyllic farm as their own. While she initially feels threatened, the group soon becomes her newfound family, offering what she hasn't felt since her father was imprisoned: security and hope. Maybe it's time to forget the family secrets buried on the farm and focus on her future..
But just as she settles into her new life, Sasha witnesses the impossible. She sees a honey bee, presumed extinct. People who claim to see bees are ridiculed and silenced for reasons Sasha doesn't understand, but she can't shake the feeling that this impossible bee is connected to her father's missing research. Fighting to uncover the truth could shatter Sasha's fragile security and threaten the lives of her newfound family—or it could save them all.
"Julie Carrick Dalton's The Last Beekeeper is a celebration of found family, an exploration of truth versus power, and the triumph of hope in the face of despair. It is a meditation on forgiveness and redemption and a reminder to cherish the beauty that still exists in this fragile world."
About the Author
Julie Carrick Dalton is the author of The Last Beekeeper, longlisted for the 2024 Massachusetts Book Award, and Waiting for the Night Song, winner of the New Hampshire Writer’s Project 2023 People’s Choice Award for Best Novel, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, and a Most Anticipated novel by CNN, USA Today, Parade and Newsweek. A former journalist, farmer, and beekeeper, she is a frequent speaker on the topic of fiction in the age of climate crisis, at universities, museums, and conferences nationally and internationally. Julie serves on the teaching faculty of Drexel University’s MFA in creative writing program and teaches Climate Fiction at Tufts University. Her third novel, The Forest Becomes Her, will be published in early 2026.
Buy the Book
To learn more about HCC's Big Read initiative, contact Alicia Drumgoole.