The young adult novel Cope Field covers some pretty adult territory — trust, abandonment and betrayal included. The book, written by T.L. Simpson of Russellville, has been awarded a 2026 Michael L. Printz Honor from the American Library Association for literary excellence in young adult literature.
It centers on Crawford "Craw" Cope, a star baseball pitcher entering his senior year of high school. He's dealing with the departure of his mother, the pressure his dad — a former Major League Baseball pitcher — places on him to excel on the field, and a court-ordered community service sentence following an act of anger.
Travis Simpson is not just an author. He's also the news editor for The Courier, the six-day-a-week newspaper in Russellville. He says he loves writing both fiction and journalism, and says one has helped fuel the other.
Simpson: I was a sports reporter for over a decade, so I kind of saw it play out a bunch of times. But I always say the seed for the story came from my own son playing baseball. He was about 8 years old, on second base, and we were winning a game like 13 to nothing. The kid at bat hit a little blooper, and my son forgot to tag up and just took off running. It ended up that the blooper came to just the right spot for it to be a double play. And the coach threw his clipboard on the ground and tore his hat off and just had this huge reaction — kind of hollered at him. I thought that was so extreme for the circumstance. I know coaches are trying to coach kids up, but it's peewee.
I looked around and all the other parents are watching this, and nobody else seems to think it's weird or too much. And it killed his love of baseball a little bit. That whole season kind of did. And he didn't play again after that. So that was kind of the first seed for it.
Combining that with just little things I observed — not just with baseball, but with lots of other sports — of kids being pushed into athletics in a really extreme way. It always struck me that most of them didn't go on to play college ball of any kind, and even fewer played any kind of professional. And so it just seemed like all of this pressure — for what? You can get the same lessons just by being a good player on a team, or an average player on a team, or from playing chess instead, or being in the band or whatever else. It doesn't require that much intensity unless you really are going somewhere, and that's really your dream and not your parents' dream.
Kellams: There's also not just sports, but issues of abandonment, love, trust. This is labeled as a young adult novel, and it reads like that, but this is a serious work. How did you balance that?
Simpson: I knew I would be writing for a young adult audience because my first book was a YA book, and we sold the second one as a YA book. So I thought about, what would I say to myself if I could go back in time and give myself some advice?
How many of us know men who won't go to the doctor? Or they won't talk about the problems they have or the emotional weight they're carrying. They don't want to talk about it with anybody. They don't want to go to a therapist. So that's kind of where Craw was born from. He is a kid that has a deep well of emotion. He thinks very deeply about things. He has a lot of opinions. But if you talk to him and ask him questions, he'll give you one or two-word answers.
I was trying to say to teen readers, especially teen boy readers — or teen boys whose teacher made them read the book — you've got to get in touch with that deep love and emotion within you and be able to express it to be a fully functional, strong, good adult person.
Kellams: Narratively, this book works so well. There are turns, and they're earned. They're not a red herring or something pulled out just for effect. How difficult was it to write, so that when we find out certain things, it feels like — yeah, this makes sense?
Simpson: That was the trick. It definitely took a lot of work. It's hard to describe without spoiling what you're talking about. But it definitely took hours and hours of revision. It's not something you just get right the first time, especially planting little seeds for it, and also kind of obscuring some of the things that Crawford has noticed, and making it believable why he wouldn't have picked up on it all the way sooner.
For instance, he won't Google his own mom because he's scared to see that she's moved on to be happy without him, and he's been stuck in this environment. He wonders if he's the reason she left. He's internalizing a lot of shame and a lot of guilt. And then there are the things that he saw the night the bad things happened — why he's not able to tie those to certain individuals in his life, because of the Christmas lights changing the colors of tattoos, and things like that.
Kellams: What I thought was also remarkable about Cope Field is that, yeah, it's set in contemporary times, and these teens have access to social media. But it took me back to the late '70s, early '80s of my high school, in some of the things that were talked about and some of the relationships. How do you make sure you're staying genuine, so that when a teenager reads this, it lands with them?
Simpson: I think Hannah Flores is a kid that we all knew in high school — just kind of a square-peg kid that listens to music that isn't what's popular right now. Maybe it's older, or maybe it's just on the fringe. Punk music is still very alive and well right now. And that kid didn't go away when we graduated. I see that kid when I would go cover athletic events for the high school. That story is still relevant. It's not something that disappeared in the age of social media. There are still those different kids, and they don't just tolerate being different — they celebrate their difference, and they don't care that you don't like them. I have a heart for that kid. And I love that kid. My fondness for that type of individual helped me keep it true.
Kellams: There's empathy in the way you write.
Simpson: Thank you. I think it comes through, and empathy is definitely something that's very important to me. I don't think I know that the majority of our domestic abuse cases and domestic violence cases involve men. And the majority of our prisons are filled with men. I think the cause of that is a lack of empathy, a failure to empathize, a failure for us to teach our boys how to be empathetic.
I've read studies that say reading increases empathy because you get a window into someone else's world and how they think, and it helps you understand other people around you. So I've kind of made it one of my goals to try to get boys reading again. That's maybe impossible, but it's definitely a dream. And I rely so much on teachers putting the book in kids' hands, because most of them aren't going to the library unless a teacher is forcing them to. But empathy — that's just so fundamental to being a good person and a good man.
Kellams: You're there in Russellville with a very good local paper. I want to give you the platform to speak to the importance of the local newspaper that covers city council and school boards — why it's so important to a town, no matter whether it's the size of Russellville or Little Rock.
Simpson: We see newspapers closing routinely, and every time I see it, I think these communities don't have a clue what they've lost. And it has a compounding, snowball effect.
Other newspapers are covering your city council, covering your school board meetings, doing feature stories on people in your community. But all of these big stories you see on broadcast news, on television or even in the New York Times — most of those, not all, but most of those, started with some reporter at a small-town newspaper who was just paying attention to a city council meeting. They wrote a story on it, or they wrote 10 or 15 stories on it, and then someone in Little Rock clicked on a link and said, "Oh, this is a big deal. We should cover this too." And then someone in New York saw it on the AP, and it just grows outward. So much of what is little corrupt or little things that should just not happen end up getting exposed through that chain of events. If you cut off the local newspaper, it goes away, because those bigger entities don't have the resources to send someone to your city council meeting every first of the month.
And then as a former sports reporter, it was always my joy to make these high school kids feel like they had made it big — putting a big feature story on them in the local paper, for their four years of high school, to feel what it might feel like if they were big time. And I always loved when I heard that they saw it and clipped it out and kept it. Print media still matters.
Kellams: Why is it important for novelists to also come from Pope County? I think of you and Eli Cranor — and why is it so important, no matter the age of the reader or the state they're reading from, to see stories from Arkansas or Vermont or the Dakotas?
Simpson: Earlier I was talking about how reading gives you a window into someone else's life, but it also gives you a mirror to see your own life. I think sometimes when we see stories about Arkansas, they're written by people who aren't from here or haven't been here very long, and they're sort of for people who don't live here to see what we're like. I really wanted to write something that was for people who do live here to see themselves. And I think everybody needs to see themselves in fiction, whether they're gay, straight, from Arkansas or whatever. Me being from here — that's my opportunity to hold up that mirror.
Travis Simpson's novel Cope Field earned a 2026 Michael L. Printz Honor for literary excellence in young adult literature from the American Library Association. Simpson also mentioned his next project — a story about a young, anime-loving outsider whose town is terrorized by a white separatist group that sets up a compound on the outskirts, and who decides to fight back. It explores the cyclical nature of violence, and asks: when is fighting back the right choice? We'll have him back on the show to talk about it.
Congratulations, Travis Simpson. Thanks so much for your time.
Simpson: Thank you for having me.
Our conversation with Travis Simpson, who is also the news editor for The Courier newspaper in Russellville, took place over Zoom earlier this month.
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