Essayist ISSAC BAILEY author of Why Didn’t We Riot: A Black Man in Trumpland, and CNN commentator BAKARI SELLERS, author of My Vanishing Country, review the life of African Americans in post-Trump America and in the South. They address traumas that shaped their lives: Dylan Roof and Mother Emmanuel AME, African American accommodation of whites, […]
Watch moderator (referee?) DREW PERRY as he survives the interests and eccentricities of two of the Carolinas’ best short story writers, ALLAN GURGANUS and GEORGE SINGLETON. Born in Rocky Mount, NC, Allan Gurganus has written four novels (including the bestselling The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All) and four short story collections and his work has appeared in The […]
Poems in a Crisis: Navigating Family, the Pandemic, and Remaking the World. Join poets TRACI BRIMHALL and NICKOLE BROWN and editor ALICE QUINN in a soulful discussion of navigating family, the pandemic and remaking the world through poetry. What does it mean to reckon with our ill treatment of animals? What does it mean to write lullabies […]
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 […]