While very few people know his name or his publishing company, Ron Sauder is gradually becoming the Eastern Shore’s literary best friend. From his small home office overlooking the Wicomico River, Sauder has not only committed himself to resurrecting the legacies of Chesapeake writers like Chestertown’s Gilbert Byron but also some of the Shore’s best contemporary authors through the recent establishment of Secant Publishing in Salisbury.
A native of Virginia, with a degree in English from the College of William and Mary, Ron had aspirations to become a writer after graduation, but very quickly found himself in leadership communications positions at Johns Hopkins and Emory University. In fact, it was only after his wife agreed to join the faculty at University of Maryland – Eastern Shore that Sauder found the opportunity to break away from higher education to follow his dream of starting a book publishing business focused on the literature and writers of his beloved Eastern Shore.
Perhaps even more impressive is the success story Secant has had since Sauder started his press. Over the last few years, Secant’s books, from the reprinting of Byron’s The Lord’s Oysters and Mission Boy to the best-selling to The Crab Cookbook by Whitey Schmidt, have met with remarkable commercial popularity. And the same hold true for his most current authors, like Easton’s Bill Peak’s award-winning The Oblate’s Confession and his most recent publication of Talbot County Librarian Karen Huston Karydes’s Hard-Boiled Anxiety, a psycho-literary analysis of “hard-boiled” detective novels in the 20th Century.
The Spy sat down with Ron to talk about his second life as publisher and his particular affection for Eastern Shore Writers.
This video is approximately six minutes in length
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