Karon Luddy, the author of Spelldown and Bewilderment of Boys, died on September 21, 2025, at the age of seventy-one. A memorial service will be held at 2:00 p.m. on Friday, November 7, at Myers Park Baptist Church, with a reception to follow. Her full obituary is available here.
Karon grew up in the small town of Lancaster, South Carolina, and she drew on her childhood memories in her creative writing. While still a child, Karon had dreams of becoming a writer, but she did not seriously pursue these dreams for many years. After graduating for UNC Charlotte in 1982, she led a successful career in sales and marketing, working for various technology companies in Charlotte, but her desire to be a writer never left her. She enrolled in the creative writing program at Queens University, where she received her MFA in 2005. She then started teaching writing courses at UNC Charlotte in both the English Department and the American Studies Program. She taught at UNC Charlotte for over ten years.
I knew Karon from her days at UNC Charlotte. During this time, she completed her debut novel, Spelldown: The Big-Time Dreams of a Small-Town Word Whiz, which Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers published in 2007. The novel deals with a thirteen-year-old girl from a small town in South Carolina who competes in the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.
I remember talking with Karon about her novel, and she told me that the central character, Karlene Kay Bridges, is largely based on herself. Like Karlene, Karon loved participating in spelling bees during her childhood. I mentioned to Karon that I hated spelling bees as a boy because I was so bad at spelling. She then explained that what she really liked about spelling bees wasn’t the process of spelling words per se but rather the learning of new words. She said that she traced her lifelong love of words back to her sixth-grade teacher who helped her prepare for spelling bees by providing her with lists of new words to study. Karon does the same thing in her novel. At the end of Spelldown, Karon provides a glossary of words (along with their definitions) that Karlene encounters at spelling bees.
Spelldown was a great success. The book received strong reviews from numerous journals, including Publishers Weekly, The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, School Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews. The reviewer for Kirkus wrote, “Karlene’s engaging personal journey from word whiz-kid to winning young woman is artfully glossed with the emerging feminism of the late 1960s. This first-rate spelldown will have readers spellbound.”
I was so impressed with Karon’s novel that I invited her to appear as a featured author at the Children’s Literature Association Conference, which I co-chaired with my friend and colleague Paula Connolly. This conference took place in Charlotte in 2009, and Karon made us all proud as a hometown star who achieved national success, just as her character does in Spelldown.
Karon followed up the success of Spelldown with a sequel titled Bewilderment of Boys, which came out in 2014. In this novel, Karlene is seventeen years old and is trying her hand at songwriting. Like Spelldown, the sequel is steeped in small-town life, but outside events also come into play. Karlene and several of the other characters are affected by the Vietnam War. Shortly after the book came out, Karon came by my office and gave me a copy of the book. We talked for a little while about the book and about growing up during the Vietnam War. We agreed that the war had shaped our teenaged years.
In more recent years, Karon served as a faculty member for Charlotte Lit. Just as she had done with the students in her UNC Charlotte classes, she encouraged the writers whom she worked with at Charlotte Lit to take full advantage of the magic power of words in their writing. Throughout her life, Karon was a word lover, and Storied Charlotte is a better place because of her love of words.