Former US Poet Laureate BILLY COLLINS has been hailed as "the most popular poet in America." RON RASH has been celebrated as the “Appalachian Shakespeare." Host Michael Gaspeny will investigate the mysteries of art and the heart in a discussion of their latest works (Whale Day: And Other Poems and In the Valley: Stories) that […]
Join Our Stories, Our Voices: 21 YA Authors Get Real About Injustice, Empowerment, and Growing Up Female in America editor AMY REED and contributors AMBER SMITH and IW GREGORIO as they discuss what it means to write in one's own voice, how do you make the personal political, what is the role of literature and art in social […]
Authors MASON DEAVER and NITA TYNDALL join host SHANNON JONES in a conversation about how Young Adult authors outside the gender binary are reshaping that world, pulling down pillars of black and white to tell stories of what growing up can mean when you feel like there’s no place for "someone like you." In a South where queer is […]
Authors GINGER GAFFNEY and JAMES TATE (JT) HILL talk about the craft of writing memoir, sifting through your personal life, and facing your vulnerability on the page with host STEVE MITCHELL. Gaffney's Half Broke is the memoir of a woman who related more to horses than people and how she finds a home of sorts teaching […]
Join Our Stories, Our Voices: 21 YA Authors Get Real About Injustice, Empowerment, and Growing Up Female in America editor AMY REED and contributors AMBER SMITH and IW GREGORIO in a writing workshop to explore how to find your own "voice" as a writer. Each author will speak about their journey and then guide participants through a writing exercise to […]
KAITLYN GREENIDGE and ANNETTE SAUNOOKE CLAPSADDLE are two rising stars in the world of literary fiction. Greenidge’s Libertie has been called “Pure brilliance. So much will be written about how it blends history and magic into a new kind of telling, how it spins the past to draw deft circles around our present--but none of it […]
CANDACY TAYLOR, author of Overground Railroad:The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America, joins preservationist NATALIE PASS-MILLER and The Historic Magnolia House, one of only four Green Book sites in North Carolina still in operation. Taylor reaches into her personal history to share the story of the Green Book and the roots […]
A Measure of Belonging: 21 Writers of Color on the New American South editor CINELLE BARNES fell in love with a boy from the Carolinas, moved South with him, and immediately encountered the worst and the best The South has to offer. Committed to “making this place as big as it is,” she found 21 […]
At the center of the powerful, tender new titles, What’s Mine and Yours by NAIMA COSTER and This Close to Okay by LEESA CROSS-SMITH, are deftly wrought, perfectly imperfect characters whose paths can never be unwoven from not only each other, but also from the ways we see our communities and ourselves. Life is often, if […]
The non-fiction work of DENISE KIERNAN has become surefire bestseller material (The Girls of Atomic City, The Last Castle) and her latest book, We Gather Together: A Nation Divided, a President in Turmoil, and a Historic Campaign to Embrace Gratitude and Grace, brings her considerable gifts to the untold story of Lincoln and the burgeoning […]
JOHN SAYLES is an indy film legend. He has written and directed dozens of movies including Lone Star, Brother From Another Planet, Matewan, Eight Men Out, and The Secret of Roan Inish. Sayles has also written a handful of novels and story collections. His 2011 novel, A Moment in the Sun, looks at America in […]
Hosted by Jennifer Worrells, HS Poet Laureate coordinator and Library Media Specialist at Grimsley High School. 2021 Poetry Judge J. SCOTT WALKER is an English and creative writing teacher based in Greensboro. When he's not teaching he writes songs, plays, and poetry. A graduate of Appalachian State University and the University of Alaska, his poems […]