Archived Events
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- September 16th, 2005
- Elizabeth Ryan -- Orange County Trio: Histories and Tour Guides
Inspired by plans for celebrating the 250th anniversary of the founding of Orange County and Hillsborough (NC), and by her experience as a resident of Chapel Hill, Elizabeth Shreve Ryan’s Orange County Trio is a lively history of the county and its towns. The “trio” includes Hillsborough, Chapel Hill—both founded in the eighteenth century—and Carrboro, which was founded in the early 1900s. Each town has its own special history and character. The book stands alone as a wealth of interesting historical facts and also provides the reader with complete, easy-to-follow sightseeing guides and maps.
The author grew up in Milledgeville, Georgia, in a family of teachers with a love of books and learning. She worked with Flannery O’Connor, a classmate, on the high school newspaper. Elizabeth arrived in Chapel Hill with her husband, John, in 1949. Elizabeth studied history with Hugh T. Lefler and Albert R. Newsome. While working in the Southern Historical Collection, she came to know William S. Powell and served as a research assistant for the Collection’s founder, J.G. de Roulhac Hamilton. Although Elizabeth did not get her doctorate — money was tight for the young couple — she now says, “I think writing this book in some ways was an attempt to make up for that.”
The Ryans left Chapel Hill in 1953, after John received his degree, and spent the next forty years living, working and raising their two daughters. Upon their return to Chapel Hill in 1993, Elizabeth fell in love with Hillsborough, which reminded her of Milledgeville. For Orange Country Trio she spent several years delving into books, newspapers, records, maps, manuscripts, and other documents and conducted dozens of interviews with historians and longtime residents.
[ Show Detail ] - October 21st, 2005
- Pat Kellerman -- Starting Over: Reinventing Life After 60
You’re about to retire and you ask yourself: “What do I want to do with the rest of my life?” Starting Over: Reinventing Life After 60 presents 40 inspiring stories of men and women across the United States who asked themselves that very question — and arrived at surprising and meaningful answers. They figured out that just beyond the deliciousness of sleeping late, savoring the morning newspaper, and spending the day on the golf course lurked a life without purpose. So they opted for meaningful and passionate new adventures for their senior years. In Starting Over they tell us about the unique paths they took and what they learned along the way… Horace Deets, former Executive Director of the AARP says, ““This enjoyable book combines inspiring stories and practical advice, and is an essential tool for people planning the rest of their lives.” Pat Skilling Kellerman is a retirement transition coach and workshop leader. Retiring from AARP in her mid-60s after 30 years in training and consulting, she had difficulty imagining possibilities for her new life ahead. Then she realized the problem was simply a lack of role models. Now she has them! Meeting and writing about the men and women of Starting Over has provided all the role models she’ll ever need.
[ Show Detail ] - November 11th, 2005
- Lawrence Naumoff -- A Southern Tragedy, in Crimson and Yellow
Lawrence Naumoff is a novelist and instructor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the winner of a Whiting Award, a Thomas Wolfe Award, and many other literary prizes. His novel Taller Women: A Cautionary Tale, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1992. His most recent novel, A Southern Tragedy, In Crimson And Yellow depicts events surrounding the 1991 Imperial Foods chicken processing plant fire in Hamlet, North Carolina. More than twenty people died – many more were injured – in their efforts to escape via doors that were reportedly locked in order to prevent vandalism and theft.
[ Show Detail ] - December 16th, 2005
- Michael Malone
Michael Malone is a novelist as well as the author of short stories, works of nonfiction, several plays, and daytime television drama. Born in Durham and currently residing in Hillsborough, his distinctive Southern voice permeates his books, which he describes as “centered in the comedy of the shared communion among very diverse groups of people who are bound together by place and the past.” Malone’s writing has been compared to Miguel De Cervantes, Charles Dickens and Henry Fielding. He is the recipient of The O. Henry Award for “Fast Love,” the Edgar for “Red Clay” and an Emmy as head writer of ABC-TV’s One Life to Live.
His most recent book is “The Killing Club,” in which murder gets personal for Jamie Ferrara, a New Jersey police detective, when an old friend from high school is killed. In short succession, several other friends follow, all of whom were members of the Killing Club, a high-school group that planned the murders of people who bugged them. Is the killer someone who supposedly committed suicide years ago? The only person Jamie can rule out is herself. The twists twist well, the characters have just the right amount of depth, and Malone’s splendid use of detail enables him to create a fascinating, multidimensional community.
[ Show Detail ] - January 20th, 2006
- Sarah Shaber -- Tar Heel Dead: Tales of Mystery and Mayhem from North Carolina
Sarah Shaber won the St. Martin’s Press Award for Best First Traditional Mystery for her first book, “Simon Said.” She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
From O. Henry to Lilian Jackson Braun, North Carolina has nurtured some of the world’s best-known mystery writers. “Tar Heel Dead” is a unique collection of mystery short stories that showcases some of North Carolina’s best writing talent from the past and the present—some famous, some less well known. Some of the mysteries are by authors who have earned solid reputations in other genres, such as Orson Scott Card and William Brittain, but as their stories here demonstrate, their talent embraces the mysterious.
The stories in this collection are as diverse as the “detectives” they feature: the Native American policeman who solves his first case on the reservation; a Siamese cat with an intuitive affection for his paraplegic neighbor; an attentive convenience store owner; and a thirty-year-old computer whiz whose body stopped growing when he was nine. They solve crimes, locate treasures, and uncover deceit in a range of tales that reflects the breadth of the genre. With stories to delight mystery devotees and fans of all good writing, this anthology highlights one of the most vibrant and popular elements of North Carolina’s literary legacy.
[ Show Detail ] - February 17th, 2006
- Marjorie Hudson -- Searching for Vifginia Dare
In 1587, before Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, three English ships filled with stouthearted men, women and children landed on Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina. Within two months, a child was born — Virginia Dare — the first baby ever born of English parents on American soil. Less than two years later, Virginia and the rest of the “Lost Colony” had vanished. Their fate continues to fascinate scholars of early America. Did the settlers starve from lack of supplies? Were they killed by Native Americans? Wiped out by a hurricane? Or did some of the colonists survive? These questions drive Hudson’s admittedly quixotic quest. Put off by the far-out legends and obsessive theories of her predecessors, Hudson begins her search with no preconceptions. She interviews folklorists and archeologists, studies archival records and personal letters, and examines ancient artifacts in her search to find out what happened to the settlers.
Marjorie Hudson holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and a BS in Interdisciplinary Studies/Women’s Studies from American University. She has worked as an editor and writer for many journals and magazines. Hudson lives on a farm in Chatham County with her husband Sam, her dogs Oz and Bean, and her goats Lone Star and Bella.
[ Show Detail ] - March 24th, 2006
- Marcie Cohen Ferris -- Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South
Since early colonial times in America, Jewish southerners have been tempted by delectable regional foods. Because some of these foods—including pork and shellfish—have been traditionally forbidden to Jews by religious dietary laws, southern Jews face a special predicament. In a culinary journey through the Jewish South, Arkansas native Marcie Cohen Ferris explores how southern Jews embraced, avoided, and adapted southern food and, in the process, have found themselves at home.
From colonial Savannah and Charleston to Civil War era New Orleans and Natchez, from New South Atlanta to contemporary Memphis and across the Mississippi and Arkansas Deltas, Ferris examines the expressive power of food throughout southern Jewish history. She demonstrates how southern Jews reinvented traditions as they adjusted to living in a largely Christian world where they were bound by regional rules of race, class, and gender.
Featuring a trove of photographs, Matzoh Ball Gumbo also includes anecdotes, oral histories, and more than thirty recipes to try at home. Ferris’s rich tour of southern Jewish foodways shows that, at the dining table, Jewish southerners created a distinctive religious expression that reflects the evolution of southern Jewish life.
Marcie Cohen Ferris is an assistant professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also associate director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies and serves as vice president of the Southern Foodways Alliance.
[ Show Detail ] - April 21st, 2006
- Louis D Rubin Jr. -- Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog: On Writers and Writing
Louis D. Rubin Jr. is largely responsible for Chapel Hill’s reputation as one of the leading centers of Southern literature.
The teacher whose former students include Clyde Edgerton, Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, John Barth and Kaye Gibbons is himself a respected writer of literary criticism, essays, history, biographies and novels.
Born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1923, Louis Rubin spent two years at the College of Charleston and received his B.A. in history from the University of Richmond after serving in the United States Army during World War II. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. In 1953, while still at Johns Hopkins, he co-edited his first book, Southern Renascence, a work which established him as a major figure in Southern literature, and in 1955 published Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youth. He has continued to write prolifically, publishing forty books since those first two. Before settling on an academic career, Rubin worked as a journalist for newspapers and the Associated Press in Hackensack, New Jersey; Wilmington, Delaware; Baltimore; and Staunton and Richmond in Virginia.Rubin came to the University of North Carolina in 1967, following two years at the University of Pennsylvania and ten at Hollins College in Virginia, where he chaired the English department for several years. He remained on UNC’s English faculty for twenty-two years, retiring from teaching in 1989 as University Distinguished Professor of English, now Emeritus. He left teaching in order to devote his energies full time to Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
In 1983, Rubin founded the press, recognizing the difficulties talented young writers have encountered in getting published, saying that he saw no reason why there should not be a “good full-fledged nationally-oriented trade publishing house in the South” to showcase Southern writers.
In “Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog,” Rubin weighs in with great wisdom on writers, writing and the many ills and exhilarations one experiences while plying the sometimes murky trade of authorship. From the agonies of writer’s block — which Rubin memorably describes as something like a moose, “massive, hirsute, inchoate, its imposing antlers spread aloft like a gantry crane” — to the finer points of modern poetry, he probes the creation, craft and consumption of the written word. If a common theme runs through these thoughtful short essays it is Rubin’s insistence on and celebration of the representation of the real, the solid, the actual stuff of life.
[ Show Detail ] - May 26th, 2006
- William D. Leuchtenburg: The White House Looks South
Dr. William D. Leuchtenburg will read from his book “The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson,” published last year by Louisiana State University Press.
Though FDR, Truman, and Johnson were not southerners in the usual sense, each demonstrated a political style and philosophy that helped them influence the South and unite the country in ways that few other presidents have. Combining vivid biography and political insight, William D. Leuchtenburg offers an engaging account of relations between these three presidents and the South while also tracing how the region came to embrace a national perspective without losing its distinctive sense of place.
Dr. Leuchtenburg is a nationally renowned specialist in recent American history and researcher. He has written extensively on Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, Roosevelt’s legacy, war, and social change in twentieth-century America, the Great Depression, the Constitution, and a presidential overview from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton. New retired, during his teaching days at UNC-Chapel Hill as William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor, he won the Favorite Faculty Award in 1990 and 1997.[ Show Detail ] - September 15th, 2006
- Sean Rowe - Fever
Sean Danger Rowe was born in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, in 1964. His father was a linguist and professor of literature, his mother a teacher, librarian and homemaker. He is the youngest of three children.
Rowe grew up outside Cleveland, Ohio; in Kalamazoo, Michigan; and in Helsinki, Finland. At age 11 he moved with his parents, brother and sister to the place he considers his hometown: Douglas, a farming community near the Okefenokee Swamp in southeastern Georgia.
Rowe attended Choate Rosemary Hall, a New England preparatory school, thanks to a scholarship provided by the Howard Heinz family. He spent two years between high school and college traveling the length of the Mississippi River on a homemade raft, working on a riverboat and a ranch, and roaming the United States, Canada and Mexico on his motorcycle. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morehead Scholar, graduating in 1988 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.
Rowe began his professional writing career at age 17 when he sold his first newspaper story to the Pawtucket Evening News in Rhode Island. This riveting, 5,000-word account of a shopping-mall fashion show earned him $25. Editors at the newspaper wisely cut the story to 500 words and ran it on the back pages.
An award-winning journalist (eventually), Rowe worked throughout college as co-editor of the Phoenix Student Newsweekly, columnist for The Daily Tar Heel, and stringer for the Durham Morning Herald. He joined the staff of the Miami Herald as a general assignment reporter upon graduation. From 1990-1999 he worked as a staff writer for the weekly Miami New Times and New Times Broward-Palm Beach. During part of this time he also worked as a registered nurse on a cancer ward.In the spring of 1999, after being hit by a train and sustaining serious injuries, Rowe left South Florida and moved to a friend’s farm in North Carolina. There he recuperated and began writing fiction. After completing a 650-page mystery novel entitled Magic City, he wrote a short, fast-paced thriller called Fever of Unknown Origin. He continued revising both manuscripts while employed as a copywriter for North Carolina-based Adam & Eve, “America’s Most Trusted Vendor of Adult Products.”
In 2004, as the result of an auction run by literary agent Sarah Burnes, Fever of Unknown Origin was sold to Little, Brown & Company as part of a two-book deal. It appeared in bookstores nationwide in September 2005 under the title Fever, available in hardback and on audio and MP3 CD. Foreign rights to Fever have been sold to Holland, Germany and France.
Rowe lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his research assistant, Deadline the Cat. He is working on his next book, a thriller about a returning Iraq combat veteran entitled “I-95.” He is also renovating a turn-of-the-century farmhouse in rural Sampson County, North Carolina, where he plans to write more page-turners, and also offer the house as a quiet getaway for exhausted journalists and aspiring authors.
Rowe is a member of the Authors Guild, the Academy of American Poets, and the North Carolina Writers’ Network. He serves as a national editor for New Times Inc.From website of author
[ Show Detail ] - October 20th, 2006
- Lucy Daniels - Eyes of the Father
Lucy Daniels, NC writer and clinical psychologist, uses the lessons learned in her personal victory over anorexia nervosa and writer’s block to assist others. Her novels include the Guggenheim Award-winning best-seller Caleb, My Son(1956) and High on a Hill (1961). Following publication of her second novel, she suffered writer’s block for nearly 40 years. Her breakthrough memoir, With a Woman’s Voice (2002) and Dreaming Your Way to Creative Freedom (2005) chronicle her empowerment and the process that enabled her to write The Eyes of the Father(2005).
The Eyes of the Father is a compelling story of people controlled by the past. This is a love story with epic dimensions in which opposites are persistent factors: black vs white, tradition vs progress, slavery vs freedom, people vs art, life on earth vs life hearafter. And, as in real life, human strength and frailty interact with fate to produce a mixture of sadness and joy in which one person’s tragedy sometimes results in victory for another.[ Show Detail ] - November 3rd, 2006
- Annette M. Council - The Recipe, Have a Seat at Our Table...
“The Recipe” is a personal story about surviving when there is not enough, maintaining when there is just enough, and remembering where she (Ms. Annette M. Council) came from when there is more than enough. The Recipe, is about how Ms. Council came to live her dream. It contains the challenges and stuggles her family endured as they went from “neighborhood bonding” to building successful enterprises in her family’s community. Ms. Council’s grandparents were her Daddy and Mama’s guide, in turn they were her guide along with her brothers and sisters. Now as they look back they are all amazed at what was made possible. In creating, “The Recipe” she has included what she considers to be her family’s list of ingredients for growth. Using these ingredients, she created a recipe that she considers to be inspirational and useful in the daily lives of those who seek guidance. Guidance is what made her mama a very successful woman, and she can now say it was her guidance that inspired her to write this book. Her story, The Recipe, is about her family of eight children, a counsin who became her brother, a Mama with a dream, and a Daddy with the heart to hustle who was around as long as he could endure.
From mamadips.com
[ Show Detail ] - December 15th, 2006
- Joanna Catherine Scott - The Road From Chapel Hill
Joanna Catherine Scott is a poet and novelist living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She was born in England, raised in Australia, and took her graduate degree in Philosophy at Duke University. Her recently published poetry collection Breakfast at the Shangri-La won the Black Zinnias Poetry Book Award from the California Institute of Arts and Letters. Her chapbooks Birth Mother and Coming Down from Bataan won the Longleaf Poetry Award and the Acorn-Rukeyser Award, respectively. She has also received the Capricorn Poetry Award, the americas review Prize for Social Poetry, the PEN/Nob Hill Poetry Award, the New England Prize for Poetry, the North Carolina Arts Council’s Blumenthal Award, a number of awards from the North Carolina Poetry Society including its Poet Laureate Award, and has read by invitation at the Library of Congress. Scott is also the author of the nonfiction collection Indochina’s Refugees: Oral Histories from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam and three novels. The Lucky Gourd Shop, a novel of South Korea, was a Book Sense Top Ten Titles pick, a Book Sense 76 pick, and nominee for Book Sense Book-of-the-Year. Excerpts won awards from Literal Latte, Georgia State University Review, and Crucible. Charlie and the Children, a novel of Vietnam, was Book-of-the-Month for the Vietnam Veteran Association’s journal Veteran. Scott’s novel Cassandra, Lost was inspired by the true story of a Maryland heiress’s elopement with a lieutenant from General Rochambeau’s French army. Booklist calls it a spellbinding tale brimming with romance, intrigue, and adventure.
Her new novel, The Road from Chapel Hill, is a story of inter-racial love and conspiracy against the Confederacy in Civil War North Carolina. It was inspired by the true story of a slave from Chapel Hill and is due out from Penguin/Berkley in November 2006.
From mipoesias.com and conteonline.net
[ Show Detail ] - January 19th, 2007
- Catherine McCall - Lifeguarding
Catherine McCall was born in Louisville, KY, educated in Atlanta and dreamed all the while of living near the ocean. She attended college and medical school and did her residency and fellowship in Atlanta, then she and her partner migrated to the coast of North Carolina when she was thirty-one years old.
ABOUT HER MEMOIR
Lifeguarding began as random memories jotted in a journal while Catherine was auditing a literature course on autobiography. She had not read many memoirs and was not especially familiar with creative nonfiction. She was, however, feverish about writing. She put the notes away and didn’t return to them for over a year, when Terry Tempest Williams served as a visiting writer at UNCW. Catherine had just started an MFA, and Terry jarred and challenged Catherine.After Terry left, Catherine decided to open those memories again and face some of the lurking questions of her family’s past.
Lifeguarding is Catherine’s first book. Described by Publisher’s Weekly : “In this powerful and surprising memoir, psychiatrist and first-time author McCall describes a Carson McCullers childhood…”
From catherinemccall.com
[ Show Detail ] - February 16th, 2007
- David Payne - Back to Wando Passo
The Boston globe wrote “David Payne may not be the most published American author homing in on 40, but he is certainly the most gifted.”
In Back to Wando Passo, David Payne “captures the essence of two distinct eras in the South, imbuing them with so much reality that we need a fan for the heat and passion of the place and a swatter for the mosquitoes. He brings all this together in an ethereal miasma of vividly remembered stories.A fast-paced adventure story filled with lyrical writing, wicked humor, and unforgettable characters, Back to Wando Passo propels the two love stories, linked by place through time, to a simultaneous crescendo of betrayal, revenge, and redemption, and asks whether the present is doomed to ceaselessly repeat the past – or if it can, sometimes, change and redeem it.
From davidpaynebooks.com and contemporarylit.about.com
[ Show Detail ] - March 16th, 2007
- Mark Etheridge - Grievances
Grievances, Mark Ethridge’s first novel is about an unsolved twenty year old murder of a thirteen-year-old boy during racial unrest in rural South Carolina. That changes when Charlotte Times reporter Matt Harper sits down with a fellow who shows up in the news room, a guy with a grievance.
As he struggles with his journalistic legacy, Harper comes to understand why the investigation must be pursued and why he must be the one to do it. Set in the rich scenery of a Savannah River town that time and justice have forgotten, Grievances is a story of newspapers, murder, and of redemptionfor a small Southern town and for Matt Harper.Mark Ethridge is a third-generation reporter and writer who directed two Pulitzer-winning investigations at the Charlotte Observer and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
from Amazon.com
[ Show Detail ] - April 20th, 2007
- Michael Parker - Don't Make Me Stop Now: Stories
These eleven arresting, comic, and moving stories by acclaimed writer Michael Parker testify to the driving force of love, the lengths to which we ll go to claim it and pursue it, the delusions we ll float to keep it going, the torment that goes part and parcel with it. And despite all of the above, the absolute necessity of it, no matter its consequences.
Whether it s a college student undone by the boy who leaves her, or the boyfriend intent on leveling old scores from high school for his lover, or the husband who discovers in the grocery store the woman he should have been with all along, every character, no matter how off track, wants to believe in debt and credit and payback and making the messy world and the messy world of love turn out neatly.
Other Books by Michael Parker * Towns Without Rivers * The Geographical Cure * Hello Down There * If You Want Me To Stay * If You Want Me To StayIn 1996 Michael Parker was a finalist for Grantas 20 best American fiction writers under 40. He is the author of Hello Down There, a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the PEN/ Hemingway award; The Geographical Cure, winner of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award; Towns Without Rivers; and Virginia Lovers. His work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, Five Points, and others, and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South. He is a professor in the M.F.A. writing program at University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
[ Show Detail ] - May 11th, 2007
- Doug Marlette - Magic Time
Doug Marlette was born in NC and raised in Durham, Mississippi, and Florida. He graduated from Florida State University and has worked for the Charlotte Observer, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, New York Newsday, the Tallahassee Democrat and the Tulsa World. Mr. Marlettes editorial cartoons and comic strip, Kudzu, are syndicated worldwide and he has won every major award editorial cartooning including the Pulitzer Prize (1988). He serves on the UNC J-Schools Board of Visitors and was appointed a Gaylord Distinquished Visiting Lecturer at the University of Oklahomas College of Journalism and Mass Communication for 2006.
Mr. Marlettes first novel was The Bridge. His latest novel, Magic Time, moves between the period of the Civil Rights Movement and the 1990s; this is the story of Carter Ransom, a son of the South who rose through the ranks as a journalist and became a successful New York newspaper columnist. When a bombing in Manhattan nearly claims the life of the woman he loves, he finds himself confronting emotional scars from thirty years ago. Returning to his hometown of Troy, Mississippi, he must sift through the memories of the deadly violence that shattered everything he had believed about hope.
From Christopher Dickey of The New York Times Book Review:
“Marlette wants to hunt out and attack the seminal issues – race, history, shame. The storytelling is involving and the plot wondrously complicated: a tall tale about terrible times that were, in memory, magical and magnificent. In “Magic Time . . . Marlette has captured something essential about the spirit of our age.”[ Show Detail ] - June 15th, 2007
- Lee Smith - On Agate Hill
Lee Smith has published eleven novels, as well as two collections of short stories, and has received eight major writing awards. Her latest novel, On Agate Hill is set in 1872 in Agate Hill, North Carolina and finds thirteen year old Molly Petree peeping out the chink of a window from her secret hiding place up in the eaves of a tumbledown old plantation house to survey a world gone wild, all expectations overthrown, all order gone. I know I am a spitfire and a burden, she begins her diary. I do not care. My family is a dead family, and this is not my home, for I am a refugee girlbut evil or good I will write it all down every true thing in black and white upon the page, for evil or good it is my own true life and I WILL have it. I will.
Carefully she places the diary in her treasured box of phenomena which will contain letters, poems, songs, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, and a large collection of bones, some human and some not by the time it is found during a historic renovation project in 2003.
The contents of Mollys box make up this extraordinary novel which chronicles her passionate, picaresque journey across the whole curve of the earth through love, betrayal, motherhood, a murder trial—-and finally back to Agate Hill to end her days under circumstances that even she could never have imagined.
www.leesmith.com[ Show Detail ] - September 21st, 2007
- Margaret Sartor - Miss American Pie
Editor, photographer, curator, and author, Margaret Sartor was born and reared in Monroe, Lousiana. She now lives in Durham and teaches at Duke University.
Awards for Miss American Pie alone include: SIBA Book Award Finalist 2007,
Book Sense Notable, 2007, Pulpwood Queens Book Club Selection, 2007,
Chicago Tribunes Best Books of the Year, 2006, Washington Post Critics Choice of Best Memoirs for 2006, Washington Post Best Books of the Year 2006, Book Sense Notable, 2006. The book also appears as a Washington Post and New York Times Bestseller, O Magazine pick What to Read This Summer, a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, a Washington Post Critics Choice Memoir for 2006, a Book Sense Notable and Book Sense Bestseller.Miss American Pie A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up in the 1970s
A spellbinding and authentic document of American adolescence.
Set against the backdrop of the deep South in the 1970s, “Miss American Pie” is the unforgettable account of Margaret Sartors life from age twelve to eighteen. A raw document crafted from diaries, notebooks, and letters, this deeply personal yet universally appealing story astonishes with its candor. Young Margaret moves with ease between the seemingly trivial concerns of hairstyles and boys to more profound questions of faith and meaning. By turns funny and poignant, heartbreaking and profound, she tackles all of the decade s issues desegregation, drugs, the sexual revolution, the rise of feminism, and the spread of charismatic evangelical Christianity with humor, frankness, and unexpected insight.
Regbook.comThe prose is laconic, guilelessly revealing and often unintentionally satiricpriceless(Miss American Pie)speaks for itself, in all its awkward, embarrassing and heartbreaking immediacy. William Grimes, the New York Times
[ Show Detail ] - October 19th, 2007
- Sharon Graham Niederhaus Together Again: A Creative Guide to Successful Multi-Generational Living
Sharon Graham Niederhaus understands the dynamics involved in living in extended family situations well. She recently completed her master’s thesis at Stanford University on multigenerational living arrangements. Sharon holds a Master of Liberal Arts degree from Stanford and a Bachelors degree in Sociology/ Anthropology from Mills College. A credentialed teacher and former director of partnerships in education, she has written numerous articles in educational journals. She lives in Portola Valley, Calif.
Together Again: A Creative Guide to Successful Multigenerational Living, by Sharon Graham Niederhaus and John L. Graham, offers positive commentary and solutions based in part on interviews with over 100 people nationwide now involved in extended family living relationships. Topics covered include the financial and emotional benefits of living together; proximity and privacy; designing and remodeling your home to accommodate adult children or elderly parents; overcoming cultural stigmas about independent living; financial and legal planning; and making co-habitation agreements.
togetheragainbook.com
[ Show Detail ] - November 16th, 2007
- Suzanne Adair - Paper Woman
Suzanne Adair is the nom de plume for Suzanne Williams, a native Floridian who currently lives with her family in North Carolina. After visiting the ruins of colonial-era Ft. Frederica on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, she began writing Paper Woman.
Paper Woman opens as the American Revolution batters the Carolinas. Sophie Barton, a thirty-three-year-old widow, leaves her home in Georgia to investigate her father’s murder and plunges into a hornet’s nest of espionage, terror, treachery, and more murder. From the backwoods and Indian lodges of colonial Georgia, to the swamps of Florida, to America’s first settlement at St. Augustine, and finally to a climax in Havana, Cuba, Suzanne Adair has written a tale that will thrill historical fiction fans.
Paper Woman is the recipient of the 2007 Patrick D. Smith Literature award, presented by the Florida Historical Society.
Suzanneadair.com, amazon.com[ Show Detail ] - December 21st, 2007
- Pamela Duncan - The Big Beautiful
As the The Big Beautiful opens Cassandra Moon realizes that she has not only broken the heart of the one man who’s ever asked her to marry — on their wedding day, no less — but she’s driven the limousine into the ground, gotten “skunk drunk” on champagne, and has somehow managed to get herself stuck in the sunroof while still in her wedding gown. Caught in a whirlwind of taffeta and tulle, heartache and second guesses, Cassandra desperately needs some peace of mind. When she arrives in the coastal town of Salter Path — disheveled and in the company of a mysterious red-haired seafaring man — Cassandra knows for sure that her life has taken a turn she can’t quite understand. But the people Cassandra encounters on this unexpected odyssey will share with her the hurts and hopes of a lifetime, and she may finally realize that getting lost in this oceanside town, in the memories and dreams of its people, is the only way she’ll be found.
Novelist Pamela Duncan was born in Asheville and grew up in Black Mountain, Swannanoa, and Shelby, North Carolina. She holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. in English/Creative Writing from North Carolina State University in Raleigh. She lives in Alamance County, North Carolina.
She is the recipient of the 2007 James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South, awarded by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her third novel, The Big Beautiful, was published in March 2007.Pameladuncan.com
[ Show Detail ] - January 18th, 2008
- AFTER JACKIE: PRIDE, PREJUDICE, AND BASEBALL'S FORGOTTEN HEROES: AN ORAL HISTORY
When Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, he forever changed the game of baseballand America itself. In After Jackie, author Cal Fussman traces Robinsons enormous legacy in sports, politics, and the civil rights movement through the men (and women) who came after him. With moving and intimate interviews of more than one hundred former major league players of African-American descent, as well as such luminaries as Jimmy Carter, Muhammad Ali, Bill Cosby, Ken Burns and Walter Cronkite, among others, After Jackie recalls the day one man altered history for so many, and the history that followed. Fussman reveals Robinson’s entrance into major league baseball to be bigger than sports and ultimately about more than just racial divisions.
Cal Fussman is a contributing editor for ESPN The Magazine and Esquire, where he has interviewed Jimmy Carter, Robert DeNiro, George Steinbrenner, Rudy Giuliani, and LeBron James, among many others. A graduate of the University of Missouri Journalism School, he lives with his family in Chapel Hill, N.C.[ Show Detail ] - February 15th, 2008
- Elaine Luddy Klonicki - All on Account of You
Elaine Luddy Klonicki is a free-lance writer who lives in Raleigh , North Carolina with her husband Gary. Her son Doug is a musician in Los Angeles , and her daughter Jenny is just starting college. Elaine has written three books, and over twenty of her articles have appeared in The News & Observer, as Point of View pieces, guest columns, and in her community column Box of Chocolates.
One of eight children in an Irish Catholic family, Elaine was born in Harrisburg , PA and grew up in Philadelphia . She moved to Raleigh in 1975 to attend NC State, graduating with a B.A. in Psychology. Before becoming a freelancer, she did technical writing for 12 years, and later worked in employee development and human resources.
Coming from such a large family herself (with 121 first cousins!), she has a strong interest in cultural and family history. Her third book, All on Account of You: A True WWII Love Story, published in 2007, is the true story of her parents courtship in the 1940s. Told in her moms voice, it includes her dads love letters. The title is based on a song her dad wrote for her mom before their wedding.
Earl Hamner, author, and creator of The Waltons and Falcon Crest TV shows, says,
This is a rich documentation of a most romantic time. I know because I was there. It was a time when every experience was heightened and shadowed by war. Music underlined every moment of our lives. Some of it was military music as we marched off to duty in Europe or Japan , but most of it was romantic. A Kiss is Just a Kiss. Till We Meet Again. I’ll See You in my Dreams.
There is humor here, and fun, as well as an interesting insight to a remarkable historical period in our country. And what might surprise some younger readers – that some of us old fogies who lived through those distant times were just as passionate and reckless and headstrong and foolish as many youngsters are today.
[ Show Detail ] - March 21st, 2008
- Maggi Ann Grace - State of the Heart: A Medical Tourists True Story of Lifesaving Surgery in India
State of the Heart is a nonfiction narrative that describes the odyssey Maggi Grace and Howard Staab undertook when Howard’s heart valve suddenly malfunctioned and the local hospital in Durham, North Carolina estimated $200,000 to fix it. They faced the entire bill since Howard had chosen not to have health insurance, and instead, flew to India for the surgery.
Part travelogue, part critique of the U.S. healthcare system, part medical drama, this memoir describes the frantic search for alternatives to mortgaging the rest of their lives in exchange for Howard’s life. It covers the trip to the Escorts Heart Institute and Research Center in New Delhi, the surgery, and its aftermath. It is also the story of how a woman, alone and consumed with worry, navigated Third World streets clogged with cattle to find such basic items as chocolate and pencils and friendship.
Maggi Grace is a writer, visual artist, and business consultant living in Carrboro, NC. She has taught writing for more than fifteen years to children and adults of all ages in classrooms, summer camps, shelters, prisons, at conferences and workshops.
maggigrace.com
[ Show Detail ] - April 18th, 2008
- Randall Kenan - The Fire This Time
Randall Kenan grew up in Chinquapin, North Carolina, and was graduated from the University of North Carolina. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia University, Duke, and the University of Mississippi, and is now at the University of Memphis. He is the author of a novel, A Visitation of Spirits, and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993. Among his awards are the Mary Francis Hobson Medal for Arts and Letters, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Prix de Rome
[ Show Detail ]