Robert Bode
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Robert Bode is a conductor, novelist, and poet. He has written texts for more than 75 choral works by American composers. His book of poetry, Crickets and Commas: Selected Poetry of Robert Bode, was published by Walton in 2021. His book of essays, Hearts All Whole: Reflections on (Life and) Twelve Choral Gems, offers insights into the performance of such iconic choral works as Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, Brahms’s O Schöne Nacht, and Lauridsen’s Sure on this Shining Night. Composer Morten Lauridsen has called the book, “a gift to the choral community.”
Miss Dot at the Hotel Metropolitan is Bode’s second novel. The first, The Turkey Men: A Civil War Love Story, is published by Spines online publishing platform. His children’s book, The Boy Who Played One Perfect Note is published by Columbus Publishing Lab. His three-act play, The Clay Dove, imagines a meeting in a Civil War army hospital between Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln six days before Lincoln’s assassination.
Bode lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his husband and elderly boxer, Spencer.
********** "In the winter of 2025, I toured the Hotel Metropolitan, now a museum, in Paducah, Kentucky. The tour was led by Betty Dobson, the museum’s charismatic and deeply committed executive director, who portrayed the hotel’s founder, Maggie Steed (1877–1925).
I was fascinated to learn that the hotel formed part of the network known as the Chitlin’ Circuit—a route of hotels, clubs, and other businesses that welcomed Black touring artists during segregation. The hotel hosted such luminaries as Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Ella Fitzgerald.
Miss Dot at the Hotel Metropolitan imagines a 1925 visit to the hotel by Dorothea “Dot” Hanford, a celebrated Black opera singer. Her arrival brings Paducah’s Black and white communities together for one fraught evening and allows the novel to explore questions of belonging, celebrity, race, and family."
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Miss Dot at the Hotel Metropolitan
Miss Dot at the Hotel Metropolitan, a 35,000-word historical novella set in Paducah, Kentucky, in the summer of 1925.
At the center of the story is the Hotel Metropolitan, a real Black-owned hotel that served African American travelers during segregation. When acclaimed Black singer Dorothea “Miss Dot” Whitfield arrives in Paducah, her presence draws together a small circle of people whose lives are already beginning to change: Maggie Steed, the hotel’s determined owner; Georgia Edwards, her eighteen-year-old niece, who dreams of leaving Paducah; Hettie Dunn, a gifted young pianist who has hidden from the world since being badly burned in a racial attack; and Gilbert Bailey, the white son of a preacher whose grief has hardened into hatred.
Their lives converge around a church recital that offers a brief vision of what Paducah might become. But outside the church, resentment is building. By the end of the night, Georgia and Gil are preparing to leave for Harlem, Hettie is stepping back into public life, and the Hotel Metropolitan itself is threatened by men determined to restore the racial boundaries they believe have been crossed.
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