Meet Jessica Walters
Atlanta Feminist, CDC Analyst, Secret Keeper The Road to Noeware, Woven Branches Series Jessica Walters is a feminist from Atlanta who works for the CDC and keeps a secret that even her closest allies don’t fully understand. She has never been to Noeware, the Southern town at the heart of G.L. Yancy’s Woven Branches Southern Gothic novella series, yet that place is somehow woven into her past in ways she cannot escape.
Jessica’s life is anchored in Atlanta: activist circles, CDC offices, and a steady rhythm of data, policy, and control. She is the kind of woman who believes in evidence, in systems, in the idea that if you can name something, you can manage it. Noeware, by contrast, is a place where the past doesn’t stay buried and where stories have weight even when no one can prove they’re true. She has never visited Noeware. For her, it exists only in reports, in rumors, and in the way it pulls at the life of Allison Edwards, the woman she loves.
Allison Edwards is Jessica’s life partner, and she is currently in Noeware on a journalism assignment. From Atlanta, Jessica watches as the town becomes more than a location for Allison’s story. It becomes a presence, a force that changes her partner in ways Jessica can feel but not fully see. Their relationship is defined by distance and by what Jessica chooses not to say. Allison is drawn deeper into Noeware’s mysteries, while Jessica remains on the outside, holding her secrets tight. Yet every call, every update, makes it clear that Noeware is not just Allison’s story; it’s entangled with Jessica’s history, her past, and the thing she has been trying to keep hidden.
The Secret That Connects Them Jessica’s work at the CDC gives her a public identity: rational, professional, grounded in science. But her secret suggests that her life is not as clean or controlled as it appears. In the book series, it becomes clear that the town’s strange patterns echo something Jessica already knows, something she has never admitted, even to Allison. Though she has never been to Noeware, the town reaches her through Allison and through the unsettling connections between her CDC work and the stories coming out of the South. She is forced to confront the possibility that her distance from Noeware has never really protected her.
