Greensboro Bound

Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing, Racism, and Asian American Life
2022-05-21 10:00 - 11:00 (America/New_York) | Stephen D. Hyers Theater, Greensboro Cultural Center, 200 N Davie Street, GREENSBORO, NC, 27401, United States
*All events are FREE, but we do ask that you please register so that we can monitor attendance and venue capacity.*
Three Asian-American authors use their work to discuss the rise in violence toward Asian-Americans while exploring the complex joys and responsibilities of writing and identity. With MICHAEL CROLEY, H’RINA DeTROY, and THIEN-KIM LAM. Hosted by SAYAKA MATSUOKA.
You may also be interested in:
• Immigration and Refugee Matters
• Afternoon Delight
MICHAEL CROLEY is the author of Any Other Place: Stories, winner of the James Still Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Weatherford Award. He is also the co-editor (with Jack Shuler) of Midland: Reports from Flyover Country. His reporting, stories, and essays have appeared in Esquire, The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, VQR, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Narrative, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He teaches at Denison University and is on the visiting faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

H’RINA DeTROY is a Montagnard American writer based in Brooklyn. She was the recipient of the 2020 Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Grant in Literature and a 2019 Emerging Writer Fellowship at Aspen Word in Memoir. Roxane Gay selected her essay entitled “The Vengeance of Elephants” for the 2017 Curt Johnson Prose Prize in Creative Nonfiction for December Magazine. She holds a Master of Arts in Journalism and MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College. She’s a teacher and working with the Montagnard Dega Association and the city of Greensboro, she created the ground-breaking workshop, “Apocalypse Never: Writing Our Origin Stories and Imaginative Futures as Montagnard Americans.” A contributing editor for DiaCRITICS, she focuses amplifying Montagnard and other indigenous, ethnic minority voices of Southeast Asian diasporas.
THIEN-KIM LAM writes stories about Vietnamese characters who smash stereotypes and find their happy endings. A recovering Type-Asian, she guzzles cà phê sữa đá, makes art, and bakes her feelings to stay sane. Thien-Kim is also the founder of Bawdy Bookworms, a subscription box that pairs sexy romances with erotic toys. She’s been featured on Jezebel, NPR, BBC America, and Glamour. Her debut novel Happy Endings is now available, and her forthcoming book will be released in 2022.

SAYAKA MATSUOKA is a freelance journalist and managing editor for Triad City Beat, an alternative weekly newspaper based in Greensboro covering the Triad. She was born in NY but raised in Greensboro. She writes mostly for the paper these days, about anything from cultural events and food to right-wing extremism and police brutality.

Hell of a State: North Carolina's Literary Fire
2022-05-20 19:30 - 21:00 | Van Dyke Performance Space, Greensboro Cultural Center, 200 N Davie Street, Greensboro, NC, 27401, United States
Advanced registration for this event is closed. However, you may "walk-up" and register onsite.

*All events are FREE, but we do ask that you please register so that we can monitor attendance and venue capacity.*
2021 National Book Award winner and North Carolina native JASON MOTT is joined by award-winning author and Greensboro’s own HOLLY GODDARD JONES as they talk about their recent work and writing from the Old North State. North Carolina Writers Network director ED SOUTHERN will moderate the conversation. With a pre-conversation performance by COLIN CUTLER of songs inspired by the short stories of Flannery O’Connor.

JASON MOTT Bestselling author, National Book Award Winner, Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction Winner, Pushcart Prize nominee, and Carnegie Medals For Excellence Longlist nominee, Jason Mott has a BFA in Fiction and an MFA in Poetry, both from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He is the author of two poetry collections and four novels. The Returned, Jason’s debut novel, was adapted for television and aired on the ABC network under the title “Resurrection.” Jason’s fourth novel, Hell Of A Book, released in June 2021, was a Jenna Bush Hager “Read With Jenna” Book Club pick, Carnegie Medals For Excellence in Fiction Longlist selection, a 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize Longlist selection, a Joyce Carol Oates Prize Longlist selection, the 2021 Sir Walter Raleigh Prize for Fiction winner, and the winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction.
HOLLY GODDARD JONES is the author of three previous books of fiction, including THE SALT LINE, THE NEXT TIME YOU SEE ME, and GIRL TROUBLE. She teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at UNCG.
ED SOUTHERN is the executive director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network, and the author of ‘Fight Songs: A Story of Love & Sports in a Complicated South,’ a finalist for the 2022 SIBA Southern Book Prize. His work has appeared in The Bitter Southerner, storySouth, the North Carolina Literary Review, and elsewhere.
COLIN CUTLER is a Greensboro-based singer-songwriter, short story writer, and poet toting a banjo, guitar, and harmonicas, with his musical roots drawing from the breadth of Americana—from Appalachian oldtime to gospel to country to roots rock. He holds an MA in English from UNC-Greensboro, an MA in creative writing from York St. John University, has taken a NC Poetry Society Gilbert-Chappell mentorship and had short stories and poetry published in The York Journal, The Catholic Poetry Room, with honorable mention from NC’s poet Laureate, Jaki Shelton Green. He is currently working on an expansion of his Peacock Feathers EP into an album of songs based on Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, and has performed for the International Flannery O’Connor Society and Andalusia Farm.

Memoir Plus: A Conversation on Hybrid Memoir
2022-05-20 17:00 - 18:00 | Scuppernong Books, 304 S Elm Street, Greensboro, NC, 27401
This event is SOLD OUT.

**THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT**

*All events are FREE, but we do ask that you please register so that we can monitor attendance and venue capacity.*

How can bringing other genres and forms into memoir enrich the text? How close must memoir adhere to the facts? What is a memoir, anyway? LAURIE STONE and ALEXIS ORGERA will use their own work to enlarge our idea of the genre and telling the story of our own lives. Hosted by STEVE MITCHELL.
You may also be interested in:
• $ WORKSHOP Down the Rabbit Hole of Your Own Life: A Creative Writing Lab with Laurie Stone
• Lost Mothers: Memoirs of Longing
• $ WORKSHOP Writing from the Body with Nicole Lungerhausen
• Lost & Found & Forgetting: Memoir as an Act of Moving Forward
• A Conversation with Ann Hood & Julia Ridley Smith

LAURIE STONE Laurie Stone is author of six books books including recently Streaming Now, Postcards from the Thing that is Happening (Dottir Press, 2022), Everything is Personal, Notes on Now (Scuppernong Editions, 2020), and My Life as an Animal, Stories (Northwestern University Press/Triquarterly Press, 2016). She was a longtime writer for the Village Voice, theater critic for The Nation, and critic-at-large on Fresh Air. She won the Nona Balakian prize in excellence in criticism from the National Book Critics Circle and two grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has published numerous stories in such publications as n + 1, Waxwing, Tin House, Evergreen Review, Electric Lit, Fence, Open City, Anderbo, The Collagist, Your impossible Voice, New Letters, TriQuarterly, Threepenny Review, and Creative Nonfiction. In 2005, she participated in “Novel: An Installation,” writing a book and living in a house designed by architects Salazar/Davis in the Flux Factory’s gallery space. She has frequently collaborated with composer Gordon Beeferman in text/music works. The world premier of their piece “You, the Weather, a Wolf” was presented in the 2016 season of the St. Urban concerts. Her next book will be The Love of Strangers, a collection of linked stories. Her website is: lauriestonewriter.com.
ALEXIS ORGERA is a poet-writer, book editor, and publisher living in North Carolina. She’s the author of two poetry collections in addition to Head Case: My Father, Alzheimer’s & Other Brainstorms (Kore Press, December 2021). Her work can be found in literary magazines like the Bennington Review, Black Warrior Review, Carolina Quarterly, Chattahoochee Review, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, Indianapolis Review, Interim, Massachusetts Review, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Third Coast, and elsewhere. More at alexisorgera.com.
STEVE MITCHELL, a writer and journalist, has published in CRAFT Literary, entropy, december magazine, Southeast Review, among others. His novel, Cloud Diary, is published by C&R Press. His book of short stories is The Naming of Ghosts from Press 53. He has a deep belief in the primacy of doubt and an abiding conviction that great wisdom informs very bad movies. He’s co-owner of Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, NC.

A Musical Thriller: Brendan Slocumb and Tona Brown in Conversation
2022-05-20 17:00 - 18:00 | Tew Recital Hall, UNCG School of Music, 100 McIver Street, Greensboro, NC, 27412, United States
Advanced registration for this event is closed. However, you may "walk-up" and register onsite.

*All events are FREE, but we do ask that you please register so that we can monitor attendance and venue capacity.*
BRENDAN SLOCUMB’S The Violin Conspiracy is a best-selling crime/thriller for the classical world and TONA BROWN’S work has thrilled audiences from Carnegie Hall to the White House with both her voice and violin. This one-of-a-kind conversation will only happen at Greensboro Bound! Hosted by DR. REBECCA MacLEOD.
You may also be interested in:
• Sounding Bodies: Identity, Injustice, and the Voice

BRENDAN SLOCUMB was raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and holds a degree in music education (with concentrations in violin and viola) from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. For more than twenty years he has been a public and private school music educator and has performed with orchestras throughout Northern Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC. He is currently working on his second novel.
TONA BROWN Vocalist, violinist, entrepreneur, and teacher Tona Brown has an international performance career throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe as a violinist and mezzo-soprano. Ms. Brown is also an advocate for transgender issues in the arts, often speaking and performing at colleges and universities. She is the first transgender woman of color to perform the National Anthem for a sitting President at the LGBT Leadership Gala Dinner for former President Barack Obama at the Sheraton in NYC. She is also the first transgender woman to headline at Carnegie Hall in a program of African-American composers with an all-inclusive LGBT cast of performers. Ms. Brown graduated from the Governor’s School for the Arts, a prestigious high school for gifted and talented students. She was formally educated at the Shenandoah University and Conservatory of Music, studying violin performance with minors in viola, piano, and voice. For Shenandoah University’s 2021 production of “Suor Angelica”, she recorded an opera movie, playing the role of La Zia Principessa. Ms. Brown will be performing in a lead transgender role as Hannah After in the opera “As One” by Laura Kaminsky with the Lowell Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Orlando Cela in the fall of 2021. Ms. Brown was also asked to do a masterclass on Transgender Voices by the Virginia National Association of Teachers. She teaches private lessons to students with her company Aida Studios.
DR. REBECCA MacLEOD is Professor of Music Education at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she directs the string education program and conducts the UNCG Sinfonia. She is the author of Teaching Strings in Today’s Classroom and is published in Journal of Research in Music Education, International Journal of Music Education, Bulletin for the Council of Research in Music Education, Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, Journal of Music Teacher Education, String Research Journal, Psychology of Music, The Strad, American String Teachers Journal, and various state music education journals. She has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Research in Music Education, the String Research Journal, and as guest reviewer for the International Journal of Research in Music Education. She is the recipient of the UNCG School of Music, Theatre and Dance Outstanding Teaching Award, the American String Teacher Association National Researcher Award, and the UNCG Junior Research Excellence Award.

An Evening with Amor Towles
2022-05-19 19:00 - 21:00 | Cone Ballroom, Elliot University Center Auditorium, UNCG, 507 Stirling Street, Greensboro, NC, 27412
This event is sold out!
If you have questions about your existing Amor Towles reservation, please contact the UNCG University Libraries at library.events@uncg.edu.
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THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT. IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS ABOUT AN EXISTING RESERVATION, PLEASE CONTACT THE UNCG UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AT library.events(at)uncg.edu.An Evening with AMOR TOWLES, hosted by XHENET ALIU.
Born and raised in the Boston area, AMOR TOWLES graduated from Yale College and received an MA in English from Stanford University. His thesis at Stanford, a short story cycle called “The Temptations of Pleasure”, was published in 1989 in Paris Review No. 112. His new novel, The Lincoln Highway, debuted at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list, and was a Today Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick, one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2021, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2021, and was #1 on Amazon’s list of the Best Books of the Year.
Mr. Towles’s first novel, Rules of Civility, which was published in 2011, was a New York Times bestseller and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of 2011. The book has been translated into over 15 languages, its French translation receiving the 2012 Prix Fitzgerald. In the fall of 2012, the novel was optioned by Lionsgate to be made into a feature film. Mr. Towles’s second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, which was published in 2016, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over 52 weeks in hardcover and was named one of the best books of 2016 by the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR. The book has been translated into over thirty-five languages including Russian. In the summer of 2017, the novel was optioned by Entertainment One and the British director, Tom Harper, to be made into a 6-8 hour miniseries starring Kenneth Branagh. He is also the author of the ebook You Have Arrived at Your Destination as part of Amazon’s Forward collection.
Having worked as an investment professional for over twenty years, Mr. Towles now devotes himself full time to writing in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife and two children.XHENET ALIU is the author of the novel Brass, winner of the biennial Townsend Prize and 2018 Georgia Author of the Year First Novel Prize, and the short story collection Domesticated Wild Things, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in fiction. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

This event is co-sponsored by:

Guilford County Schools High School Poet Laureate Year-end Reading
2021-05-19 18:00 - 21:00 | LIVE ZOOM
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 have appeared in Town Creek Poetry, Big River Poetry, Cold Mountain Review, and Cirque. The emphasis on place in his work is the natural product of having lived in ten US states including both Carolinas, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Alaska. He has also traveled extensively outside of the US both in a physical sense and also in his imagination. His collection A Concept of Right Now was published in 2019.
REGISTRATION REQUIRED
[“view event page” link below]

Wilmington's Lie: A Conversation with John Sayles & David Zucchino
2021-05-16 18:00 - 19:00 | VIRTUAL
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 1898 and the Wilmington Race Riot figures prominently in the narrative. DAVID ZUCCHINO’s 2020 nonfiction book, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, is the definitive book on the massacre. Together, Sayles and Zucchino will talk about the atmosphere in Wilmington in 1898 and the lasting impact of the white riot through the 20th Century. The discussion will also focus on the parallels with the January 6, 2021 insurrection and the continued strain of white supremacy in America. Hosted by BRIAN LAMPKIN. (rsvp required; see below)
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.
DAVID ZUCCHINO is the author of Wilmington’s Lie, Thunder Run and Myth of the Welfare Queen. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times, covering Afghanistan and Iraq. He has been a foreign correspondent from more than 30 years, reporting from more than three dozen countries. He is a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from apartheid South Africa.
Author Website
JOHN SAYLES career as a storyteller began with his fiction. His first novel was Pride of the Bimbos (1975) followed by Union Dues (nominated for National Book Award and National Critics Circle Award), the short story collection At the Anarchists Convention, Los Gusanos, Dillinger in Hollywood, and his epic historical novel A Moment in the Sun . His latest work is Yellow Earth. Fiction brought Sayles to the attention of legendary Director/Producer Roger Corman, for whom he wrote screenplays. Screenwriting is still Sayles’ primary profession, and credited or not, he has been able to work in a myriad of genres.
Author Website
BRIAN LAMPKIN is the Vice Chair of the Greensboro Literary Organization, the producer of the Greensboro Bound Literary Festival, author of The Tarboro Three: Rape, Race, and Secrecy, and co-owner of Scuppernong Books. A former social worker and teacher, Brian spends his life advocating for social justice and sharing his love of the written word with any and everyone who walks through Scup’s doors.

A Conversation on Race & Grace in America, with Denise Kiernan & D. Watkins
2021-05-16 17:00 - 18:00 | VIRTUAL
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 of the Thanksgiving holiday. D. WATKINS, author of the recent We Speak for Ourselves: How Woke Culture Prohibits Progress (and also The Cook-Up: A Crack Rock Memoir and The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America), introduces you to Down Bottom, the storied community of East Baltimore that holds a mirror to America’s poor black neighborhoods–“hoods” that could just as easily be in Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, or Atlanta. As Watkins sees it, the perspective of people who live in economically disadvantaged black communities is largely absent from the commentary of many top intellectuals who speak and write about race.[rsvp required; see below]
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.
DENISE KIERNAN is a writer and producer. She writes for herself, has ghost written, and has written for both adults and children. And she’s occasionally written with her husband, author Joseph D’Agnese. She started out in journalism and has covered everything from women’s issues, sports and history to food, travel and education in places like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Saveur, Discover, Ms., Reader’s Digest, and others. She also worked as head writer for ABC‘s “Who Wants to be Millionaire” during its Emmy award-winning first season and has produced for ESPN, MSNBC and a variety of independent productions.
Author Website
D. WATKINS is Editor at Large for Salon. He holds a Master’s in Education from Johns Hopkins University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Baltimore where he is a college lecturer and founder of the BMORE Writers Project. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America and The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir and We Speak for Ourselves: A Word from Forgotten Black America. Watkins is from and lives in Baltimore.
Author Website

Naima Coster & Leesa Cross-Smith
2021-05-16 16:00 - 17:00 | VIRTUAL
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 not entirely, a series of crossed paths. Some paths are random kismet, some are paths you get to suddenly, with a crash. Hosted by MACKENZIE FILSON.
[rsvp required; see below]
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.
NAIMA COSTER is the author of Halsey Street and What’s Mine and Yours. Naima has taught writing for over a decade in community settings, youth programs, and universities. Most recently, she has taught writing in the MFA programs at the City College of New York, Antioch University in L.A., and the University of Michigan. She also writes the newsletter, Bloom How You Must. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Author Website
LEESA CROSS-SMITH is God’s little creature from Kentucky. She is an INFJ, a homemaker, a plant lover, and the author of This Close To Okay, So We Can Glow: Short Stories, Every Kiss A War and Whiskey & Ribbons. She lives in Kentucky with her husband and children.
Author Website
MACKENZIE FILSON is a writer, bookseller, and too-proud Floridian. A graduate of Emerson College’s publishing program as well as Columbia University’s publishing course, she has worked in publicity for Penguin Random House, as well as a bookseller for The Harvard Coop, Skylight Books and, of course, Scuppernong Books.

A Measure of Belonging: 21 Writers of Color on the New American South
2021-05-16 15:00 - 16:00 | VIRTUAL
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 other writers of color, both established and emerging, who are also confronting the paradoxes that envelop the South. A Measure of Belonging is the space she held for their stories. Contributors IVELISSE RODRIGUEZ and DIANA CEJAS join us to talk about their experiences— the good, the bad, and the befuddling— of living down south. [rsvp required; see below]
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.
CINELLE BARNES is a memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir (Little A, 2018) and Malaya: Essays on Freedom (Little A, 2019), and the editor the New York Times New & Noteworthy book, A Measure of Belonging: 21 Writes of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, 2020). She earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College. She is currently at work on a nonfiction narrative book on climate justice and the Philippine water crisis.
Author Website
IVELISSE RODRIGUEZ’s debut short story collection Love War Stories is a 2019 PEN/Faulkner finalist and a 2018 Foreword Reviews INDIES finalist. She is the founder and editor of an interview series focused on contemporary Puerto Rican writers published in Centro Voices. She was a senior fiction editor at Kweli and is a Kimbilio fellow and a VONA/Voices alum. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College and a Ph.D. in English-creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Author Website

DIANA CEJAS is a pediatric neurologist and writer in Durham, NC. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in medical journals and literary magazines including The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Iowa Review, and Catapult, among others. She is currently working on a memoir that describes her life as a physician-patient. She spends her days off on her family’s farm gardening and tending to their honeybees.

LIVE Candacy Taylor and The Historic Magnolia House
2021-05-16 14:00 - 15:00 | LIVE ZOOM
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 of black travel in America. This beautifully researched and illustrated book chronicles the publication of the Green Book between 1936-1967. Pass-Miller’s family purchased the home at 442 Gorell Street in 1995 and worked over the next 22 years on it’s restoration. The Magnolia House was frequented by some of our nation’s most well-known African Americans including James Baldwin, Louise Armstrong, and Jackie Robinson during segregation. Work is underway to complete its restoration as a museum and to bring it back into operation as a hotel. Hosted by RODNEY DAWSON. [event is free, but registration is required]

Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.
CANDACY TAYLOR is an award-winning author, photographer and cultural documentarian working on a multidisciplinary project based on the Green Book. She is the author of the bestselling book, Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America (Abrams Books). Taylor is also the curator and content specialist for the exhibition, The Negro Motorist Green Book, which is being toured by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) from 2020 to 2024. Taylor was a fellow at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University under the direction of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and her projects have been funded by numerous organizations including, The Library of Congress, National Geographic, The American Council of Learned Societies, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The National Park Service, The National Trust, and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Taylor’s work has been featured in over 65 media outlets including The Atlantic, CBS Sunday Morning, The Guardian UK, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Newsweek, PBS Newshour, and The Wall St. Journal. Taylor lives in Harlem, New York.
Author Website
NATALIE PASS-MILLER is the owner and operator of The Historic Magnolia House and Inn. A Greensboro native, Natalie attended NC A&T State University where she received a degree in nursing. She later became an IT professional and traveled around the southeast with her family, before moving back to Greensboro in 2018 to help her father, Sam Pass, complete the restoration work on the home. Natalie has a rich family lineage that includes her great, great grandfather, Jefferson Davis Diggs, who was one of the founders of the school that would become Winston-Salem State University; her uncle Samuel Penn, was Greensboro’s first Black police officers; and her aunt Eloise Logan-Penn, was the first Black woman to run a music program in the local schools and created the Delta Sigma Theta “Sweetheart Song”. In April, The Magnolia House announced that it would once again open as an inn this fall.
Magnolia House Website
RODNEY DAWSON is the Curator of Education for the Greensboro Historical Museum. He is an Army veteran, former on-air radio personality, and former Crisis Prevention Intervention instructor. He received his Ed.S (Education Specialist) degree from Liberty University.
He is responsible for a variety of the Museum’s virtual experiences, including the Juneteenth celebration and a forthcoming Holocaust program.
This event is sponsored by:

The Soul of the Novel: Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle & Kaitlyn Greenidge, with Zelda Lockhart
2021-05-16 13:00 - 14:00 | VIRTUAL
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 will measure up to the singular joy of reading this book.” And Lee Smith says of Clapsaddle’s Even As We Breathe: “Clapsaddle lifts the curtain to show us a South we don’t know, revealed through the struggles of Cowney Sequoyah, a young man growing up within the Cherokee Nation of far Western North Carolina. A wonderful novel, complicated as life itself — thrilling, mysterious, and finally, a revelation!” This conversation is moderated by NC novelist ZELDA LOCKHART and informed by her work, The Soul of the Full-Length Manuscript: Turning Life’s Wounds into the Gift of Literary Fiction, Memoir, or Poetry.
[rsvp required; see below]
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.
KAITLYN GREENIDGE debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, was one of the New York Times Critics’ Top 10 Books of 2016 and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times, and her writing has also appeared in Vogue, Glamour, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Greenidge lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Author Website
ANNETTE SAUNOOKE CLAPSADDLE an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) and holds degrees from Yale University and the College of William and Mary. Her work Going to Water won the Morning Star Award for Creative Writing from the Native American Literature Symposium and was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. She is co-editor of the Journal of Cherokee Studies and serves on the board of trustees for the North Carolina Writers’ Network. She resides in Qualla, North Carolina.
Author Website
ZELDA LOCKHART holds a PhD in Expressive Arts Therapies, an MA in Literature and a certificate in writing, directing and editing from the New York Film Academy. Her latest books include Diamond Doris: The True Story of the World’s Most Notorious Jewel Thief by Doris Payne with Zelda Lockhart, and The Soul of the Full-Length Manuscript: Turning Life’s Wounds into the Gift of Literary Fiction, Memoir, or Poetry. She is also the author of Fifth Born and Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle. She is Director at Her Story Garden Studios: Inspiring Black Women to Self-Define, Heal and Liberate Through the Literary Arts, and Publisher at LaVenson Press: Publishing for Women & Girls of Color. Organizations globally have recognized Dr. Lockhart’s talent as an inspiring teacher, facilitator, and public speaker.
Author Website

This event is sponsored by

LIVE Your Story, Your Voice: A Writing Workshop
2021-05-16 12:00 - 13:30 | LIVE ZOOM
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 uncover your own voice. Workshop will conclude with a participant discussion and an opportunity to share your writing. A great opportunity to explore writing in an authentic voice for young adults, parents of young adults, aspiring YA writers, and marginalized communities.

Conversations
Saturday, 5/15 – Part 1 – Our Stories, Our Voices: Four Years On
Sunday, 5/16 – Part 2 – Our Stories, Our Voices: Writing As Activism

AMY REED is the award-winning author of several novels for young adults, including The Nowhere Girls, The Boy and Girl Who Broke the World, Beautiful, Clean, and Crazy. Her newest book, the psychological thriller Tell Me My Name, is a near-future, gender-swapped retelling of The Great Gatsby. Amy is a feminist, mother, and Virgo who enjoys running, making lists, and wandering around the mountains of western North Carolina where she lives.
Author Website
AMBER SMITH is the New York Times bestselling author of the young adult novels The Way I Used to Be, The Last to Let Go, and Something Like Gravity. An advocate for increased awareness of gendered violence, as well as LGBTQ equality, she writes in the hope that her books can help to foster change and spark dialogue surrounding these issues. She grew up in Buffalo, New York, and now lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her wife and their ever-growing family of rescued dogs and cats.
Author Website
IW GREGORIO is a practicing surgeon by day, masked avenging YA writer by night. She is author of This is My Brain in Love, which was awarded the 2020 Schneider Family Book Award by the American Library Association. After getting her MD, she did her residency at Stanford, where she met the intersex patient who inspired her debut novel, None of the Above, which was a Lambda Literary Finalist, a Publishers Weekly Flying Start, and an ALA Rainbow List selection. She is proud to be a board member of interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth, and is a founding member of We Need Diverse Books. Her essays have been published in Newsweek, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Scientific American, among others.
Author Website

This event is sponsored by:

Art of Memoir with Ginger Gaffney and James Tate Hill
2021-05-16 12:00 - 13:00 | VIRTUAL
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 at an alternative prison ranch. Blind Man’s Bluff is James Tate Hill’s memoir of becoming legally blind at age 16, but pretending for years that he was not. [rsvp required; see below]
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.
GINGER GAFFNEY received her MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work has been published in Witness Magazine, The Utne Reader, Tin House and other publications. She lives between Mesa Prieta and the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico.
Author Website
JAMES TATE HILL is the author of a memoir, Blind Man’s Bluff, coming July 2021 from W. W. Norton. His fiction debut, Academy Gothic, won the Nilsen Literary Prize for a First Novel. His essays have been listed as Notable in the 2019 and 2020 editions of Best American Essays, and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Writer’s Digest, Story Quarterly, and Hobart, among others. He serves as fiction editor for the literary journal Monkeybicycle and contributing editor for Literary Hub, where he writes a monthly audiobooks column. He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina with his wife.
Author Website
STEVE MITCHELL is an award-winning writer and journalist. His novel, Cloud Diary, is published by C&R Press. His book of short stories is The Naming of Ghosts from Press 53. He is a winner of the Curt Johnson Prose Prize and the Lorian Hemingway International Short Story Prize. He’s currently writing a mix of memoir and film criticism for a project he calls Mirrorbox. He’s co-owner of Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, NC.

Writing Outside the Lines: Nonbinary Authors Changing YA, with Mason Deaver & Nita Tyndall
2021-05-16 11:00 - 12:00 | VIRTUAL
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 still occasionally spat like a curse and many people have never heard terms like cis, trans, or nonbinary, Nita Tyndall and Mason Deaver show us that growing up southern and nonbinary doesn’t have to be lonely, and can even open your eyes to loves and griefs and joys you never could have found anywhere else. [rsvp required; see below]
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.

MASON DEAVER, an award-winning, bestselling author and designer, was born and raised in a small eastern North Carolina town. They now live in Charlotte where they’re an active fan of horror movies and video games.
Author Website
NITA TYNDALL is a passionate queer advocate and literary translator who writes the kinds of books they needed in high school. Their translations from the German have appeared in World Literature Today, and they have previously written for outlets like Autostraddle and were part of the Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat in 2017. They live in North Carolina with their partner and a beautifully fluffy cat, Pumpkin.
Author Website
SHANNON JONES is a queer writer and bookseller who manages Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, NC. She’s also proud to help run the Authors Engaging Students program at Greensboro Bound which brings authors and books to Guilford County Schools students.
This event is sponsored by

Our Stories, Our Voices: Writing As Activism
2021-05-16 10:00 - 11:00 | VIRTUAL
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 justice, and how is artistic or literary activism defined.
Saturday, 5/15 – Part 1 – Our Stories, Our Voices: Four Years On
Sunday, 5/16 – Your Story, Your Voice: A Writing Workshop

Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book images above.

AMY REED is the award-winning author of several novels for young adults, including The Nowhere Girls, The Boy and Girl Who Broke the World, Beautiful, Clean, and Crazy. Her newest book, the psychological thriller Tell Me My Name, is a near-future, gender-swapped retelling of The Great Gatsby. Amy is a feminist, mother, and Virgo who enjoys running, making lists, and wandering around the mountains of western North Carolina where she lives.
Author Website
AMBER SMITH is the New York Times bestselling author of the young adult novels The Way I Used to Be, The Last to Let Go, and Something Like Gravity. An advocate for increased awareness of gendered violence, as well as LGBTQ equality, she writes in the hope that her books can help to foster change and spark dialogue surrounding these issues. She grew up in Buffalo, New York, and now lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her wife and their ever-growing family of rescued dogs and cats.
Author Website
IW GREGORIO is a practicing surgeon by day, masked avenging YA writer by night. She is author of This is My Brain in Love, which was awarded the 2020 Schneider Family Book Award by the American Library Association. After getting her MD, she did her residency at Stanford, where she met the intersex patient who inspired her debut novel, None of the Above, which was a Lambda Literary Finalist, a Publishers Weekly Flying Start, and an ALA Rainbow List selection. She is proud to be a board member of interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth, and is a founding member of We Need Diverse Books. Her essays have been published in Newsweek, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Scientific American, among others.
Author Website

This event is sponsored by:

LIVE A Conversation with Billy Collins & Ron Rash
2021-05-15 19:00 - 20:00 | LIVE ZOOM
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 promises to ripple with wit and soar with elegiac power. [event is free, but registration is required]

Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book images above.
BILLY COLLINS is the author of twelve collections of poetry including The Rain in Portugal, Aimless Love, Horoscopes for the Dead, Ballistics, The Trouble with Poetry, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. He is also the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds. A former Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, Collins served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and as New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. In 2016 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Florida with his wife Suzannah.
Author Website
RON RASH is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena and Above the Waterfall, in addition to four prizewinning novels, including The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.
Author Website
Michael Gaspeny is the author of the novella in verse, The Tyranny of Questions (Unicorn Press) and the chapbooks Re-Write Men and Vocation. He has won the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition and the O. Henry Festival Short Story Contest. He has served as moderator for several Scuppernong and Greensboro Bound events, including forums on Flannery O’Connor and James Baldwin. A former reporter and sportswriter, he taught journalism and English for almost forty years, mainly at Bennett College and High Point University, where he won the distinguished teaching award. For hospice service in Greensboro, North Carolina, he has received The Governor’s Award for Volunteer Excellence.

This event is sponsored by:

Poems in a Crisis with Traci Brimhall, Nickole Brown, and Alice Quinn
2021-05-15 16:00 - 17:00 | VIRTUAL
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 after the death of one’s mother, the murder of a friend, and the end of a marriage? What is it to bear witness to a pandemic that killed more than half a million people in the United States and millions around the world? Host KATIE KEHOE delves into these questions and more. [rsvp required; see below]
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.
TRACI BRIMHALL is the author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon, 2020); Saudade (Copper Canyon, 2017), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Poetry, The Believer, The New Republic, and Best American Poetry. A 2013 NEA Fellow, she’s currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.
Authors Website
NICKOLE BROWN received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. The audiobook of that collection became available in 2017. Currently, she teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, NC, where she periodically volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. A chapbook called To Those Who Were Our First Gods won the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and a long sequence called The Donkey Elegies was published as a chapbook by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020.
Author Website
ALICE QUINN was the executive director of the Poetry Society of America for eighteen years, the poetry editor at The New Yorker from 1987 to 2007, and an editor at Knopf for more than ten years prior to that. She teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and is the editor of a book of Elizabeth Bishop’s writings, Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, as well as a forthcoming book of Bishop’s journals. She lives in New York City and Millerton, New York.
KATIE KEHOE’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salt Hill, Boudin–the online home of the McNeese Review, The Indianapolis Review, Bayou Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the NC State poetry contest (2019), and nominated for a Pushcart (2020). She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and currently she works as a librarian.

Allan Gurganus & George Singleton
2021-05-15 16:00 - 17:00 | VIRTUAL
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 New Yorker, The Atlantic, Paris Review and everywhere good literature is read. George Singleton was raised in Greenwood, SC and has an MFA in fiction from UNC Greensboro. He is the author of two novels and nine short story collections, including the recent You Want More. With his signature darkly acerbic and sharp-witted humor, Singleton has built a reputation as one of the most astute and wise observers of the South. [rsvp required; see below]
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.

ALLAN GURGANUS is a trained painter, author, and eloquent critic of homophobia, racism and much American foreign policy. He first turned to writing onboard the USS Yorktown during the Vietnam War and subsequently graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. He is an alum of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he was mentored by Stanley Elkin and John Cheever. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Adaptations of his fiction have won four Emmys.
Author Website

GEORGE SINGLETON was raised in Greenwood, South Carolina. He has published nine collections of stories, two novels, and (with Daniel Wallace) a book of advice. In a 2006 interview Singleton recalled his beginnings as a writer and his slow but sure path to national prominence as a southern writer: “I plowed on until I found a voice, and understood that I would try to write about how the saddest moments can be the funniest.” He is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
DREW PERRY teaches writing at Elon University and writes a monthly column for Our State magazine. His novels include, This Is Just Exactly Like You, a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan prize from the Center for Fiction, a Best-of-the-Year pick from The Atlanta Journal Constitution, and a SIBA Okra pick, and Kids These Days. He lives with his wife and two sons.

This event is sponsored by:

Issac Bailey & Bakari Sellers
2021-05-15 15:00 - 16:00 | VIRTUAL
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, the myths and truths that made Donald Trump president, reparations, and the changes we must make to end 400+ years of systemic racism. Hosted by STEPHEN COLYER. [rsvp required; see below]
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.
BAKARI SELLERS is a CNN political analyst and was the youngest-ever member of the South Carolina state legislature. Recently named to TIME’s “40 Under 40” List, he is also a practicing attorney fighting to give a voice for the voiceless.
Author Website

ISSAC BAILEY is a veteran journalist who has won numerous writing and reporting awards and has conducted investigations that led to changes in the way the S.C. Department of Social Services handles child protection cases. He is also a certified guardian ad litem and has served as the legal representative in Family Court for children in distress and has spent several years mentoring troubled youth in a variety of capacities. Bailey is Davidson College’s Batten Professor and taught journalism and applied ethics at Coastal Carolina University for several years. He is married to Dr. Tracy Bailey, founder and executive director of non-profit literacy organization, Freedom Readers, and has two teenaged children. Bailey’s 2018 book, My Brother Moochie, which discusses the effects of the criminal justice system on black families, has received critical acclaim and has been featured in the New York Times.
Author Website

STEPHEN COLYER is the Greensboro Literary Organization Board Treasurer and one of the founders of Greensboro Bound. He has been thrilled to see an idea crystallize, grow and become a valued part of our community’s arts ecosystem. His interest in book fairs/literary festivals stemmed from a 21 year sojourn in Miami where he attended and then volunteered with Miami Book Fair, the largest literary festival in the United States. He lives in Jamestown, NC with his wife Sandra and their dog, Missy.

LIVE All Up In Your Feels, a poetry workshop
2021-05-15 14:00 - 15:30 | LIVE ZOOM
Join poets and partners JESSICA JACOBS and NICKOLE BROWN in a poetry workshop to get “All Up In Your Feels.”
For all you lonely hearts, flaming hearts, celebrators (or detesters) of Valentine’s Day, this generative workshop focuses on the difficult art of writing about love. We’ll draw inspiration from poems by Traci Brimhall and Dorianne Laux before turning your own hand to the page to write of eros but free from its sappy, chocolate-dipped clichés—or conversely, to write about heartbreak or downright lack of love with nuance and grace. Open to writers of all levels, this session is a solid choice for anyone wanting to write about love in any genre, and we hope that you’ll leave with some strategies that will help you address one of the heart’s most pervasive conundrums. There will be opportunities to write (and possibly share your newfound lines) during our time together, so come ready and willing to play. Authors’ Website

Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.
JESSICA JACOBS is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year and winner of the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and Goldie Award. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal, Jessica lives in Asheville, NC, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, with whom she co-authored Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/PenguinRandomHouse), and is at work on a collection of poems exploring spirituality, Torah, and Midrash.
Author Website
NICKOLE BROWN received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. The audiobook of that collection became available in 2017. Currently, she teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, NC, where she periodically volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. A chapbook called To Those Who Were Our First Gods won the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and a long sequence called The Donkey Elegies was published as a chapbook by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020.
Author Website

Poems In Crisis, poetry panel with Tracy Brimhall, Nickole Brown, and Alice Quinn

Read Romance, Fight Patriarchy!
2021-05-15 14:00 - 15:00 | VIRTUAL
Read Romance, Fight Patriarchy! Host SARAH COLONNA frames the conversation thusly with romance Authors KIANNA ALEXANDER, ROSIE DANAN, JOANNA LOWELL, and ALISHA RAI. Our authors unpack the ways in which modern romance writers are reshaping what it means to write romance novels by crafting stories that are more reflective of the reality of “romance” and more inclusive of love in all its varied shapes and forms. [rsvp required; see below]
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.
KIANNA ALEXANDER, like any good Southern belle, wears many hats: doting mama, advice-dispensing sister, fun aunt and gabbing girlfriend. She’s a voracious reader, an amateur seamstress and occasional painter in oils.
Author Website
ROSIE DANAN writes steamy, big-hearted books, articles, and tweets about the trials and triumphs of modern love. The New York Times called her debut novel, The Roommate, “a book about people expanding into their best possible selves…warmly funny and gorgeously sexy” has been optioned for film, and a companion book The Intimacy Experiment was released this April. When not writing, Rosie enjoys jogging slowly to fast music, petting other people’s dogs, and competing against herself in rounds of Chopped using the miscellaneous ingredients occupying her fridge.
Author Website
JOANNA LOWELL lives among the fig trees in North Carolina, where she teaches in the English department at Wake Forest University. When she’s not writing historical romance, she writes collections and novels as Joanna Ruocco. Those books include Dan, Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith, The Week, and Field Glass, co-authored with Joanna Howard.
Author Website

ALISHA RAI writes award-winning emotionally complex contemporary romance novels and is frequently sought as a speaker on a range of topics covering romance and media. She is the first author to have an indie-published book appear on Washington Post’s annual Best Books list. When she’s not writing, Alisha is traveling, tweeting or tiktoking.
Author Website
SARAH COLONNA is the Associate Faculty Chair of Grogan College at UNC Greensboro. She has an interdisciplinary background with degrees in Education, Women’s and Gender Studies, and nursing. Her research interests include teaching creatively and imaginatively using Young Adult Literature, narrative, and storytelling. She is a life-long reader who added herself to her grandmother’s romance book circle as a teen and hasn’t stopped reading since.

Speculative Fiction with Rivers Solomon & KM Szpara
2021-05-15 13:00 - 14:00 | VIRTUAL
In their new novel, Sorrowland, RIVERS SOLOMON introduces us to Vern, a pregnant woman on the run from the mysterious compound where she was raised. As she seeks shelter in the woods, she begins to change. KM SZPARA’s new novel, First, Become Ashes, follows Lark, raised since childhood to fight and kill monsters before the FBI arrives to tell him it’s all fake. As the best of speculative fiction does, these novels force their protagonists to question what’s real in their lives and shine a light for readers on our society’s darker realities. Join host JASON HERNDON as he discusses the speculative fiction genre, these stories, and the truths conjured and revealed by these tales. [rsvp required; see below]
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.
RIVERS SOLOMON writes about life in the margins, where they are much at home. Solomon’s debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts appeared on the Stonewall Honor List and won a Firecracker Award. Solomon’s second book, The Deep, based on the Hugo-nominated song by the Daveed Diggs-fronted hip-hop group clipping, was the winner of the 2020 Lambda Award. A refugee of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, Solomon was born on Turtle Island but currently resides on an isle in an archipelago off the western coast of the Eurasian continent.
Authors Website
KM SZPARA is a queer and trans author who lives in Baltimore, MD, with his tiny dog and goofy cat. He is the author of speculative novels such as First, Become Ashes, Docile, and a third in 2022 that follows up on his Hugo and Nebula nominated novelette, Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time. They’re about cults and trauma, consent and debt, and a horny trans vampire, respectively. His short fiction appears in venues such as Tor.com, Uncanny, and Lightspeed.
Author Website
JASON HERNDON is an author of speculative fiction and poetry. All his characters are Black unless otherwise noted. A psychologist by training, he is fascinated by people, families, and their relationships. His work appears in Star*Line Magazine and Inkwell Black. Originally from Texas, he now resides in Greensboro, NC with his wife and dog.

Love, Justice, and Healing with Sharon Salzberg & Omid Safi
2021-05-15 12:00 - 13:00 | VIRTUAL
Join us in a discussion on love, justice, and healing with SHARON SALZBERG and OMID SAFI. Host MOLLY SENTELL HAILE will explore how ideas of radical love and loving kindness relate to our personal lives, pandemic living, and social change. Sharon Salzberg is a central figure in the field of meditation and a world-renowned teacher and author of eleven books, including the New York Times bestseller Real Happiness and, most recently, Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World. Omid Safi, translator and editor of Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition, is a professor of Islamic studies at Duke University and leads Illuminated Tours interfaith journeys. Both Safi and Salzberg have been columnists for On Being, a website and public radio program that explores what it is to be human and how we want to live.[rsvp required; see below]
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.
SHARON SALZBERG is a meditation pioneer and industry leader, a world-renowned teacher, and New York Times bestselling author. As one of the first to bring meditation and mindfulness into mainstream American culture over 45 years ago, her relatable, demystifying approach has inspired generations of meditation teachers and wellness influencers. Sharon is co-founder of The Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA, and the author of eleven books, including the New York Times bestseller, Real Happiness, now in its second edition, her seminal work, Lovingkindness, and her newest book, Real Change: Mindfulness To Heal Ourselves and the World. Sharon’s secular, modern approach to Buddhist teachings is sought after at schools, conferences, and retreat centers worldwide. Her podcast, The Metta Hour, has amassed over 3 million downloads and features interviews with the top leaders and thinkers of the mindfulness movement and beyond. Sharon’s writing can be found on Medium, On Being, the Maria Shriver blog, and Huffington Post.
Author Website
OMID SAFI is a teacher in the Sufi tradition of Radical Love. He is a professor at Duke University specializing in Islamic spirituality and contemporary thought. Omid has published extensively on the foundational sources of Islam and Sufism. His Memories of Muhammad is a biography of the Prophet Muhammad. His most recent book is Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition (published by Yale). He has been invited by the family of Dr. King to speak at Ebenezer Church on the relevance of Dr. King for today’s America, and has delivered the Martin Luther King keynote in the annual national MLK service. His Illuminated Tours have taken more than a 1,000 friends from over twenty countries to Turkey and Morocco since 2002, and he is now offering Illuminated Courses for online offerings on spiritual traditions open to seekers of all backgrounds.
Author Website
MOLLY SENTELL HAILE’s short stories and nonfiction have appeared in or are forthcoming in Oxford American, The North Carolina Literary Review, O. Henry Magazine, Jabberwock Review, and elsewhere. She was awarded the 2020 Doris Betts Fiction Prize, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was a notable in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s MFA in Creative Writing, she currently teaches creative writing classes for people with cancer, survivors, and caregivers at Hirsch Wellness Network in Greensboro and is at work her first novel.

This presentation is sponsored by

Hidden Histories with Lisa Levenstein & Shanna Greene Benjamin
2021-05-15 11:00 - 12:00 | VIRTUAL
Join the discussion with SHANNA GREENE BENJAMIN and LISA LEVENSTEIN about memory, the public persona and the private individual, the biographer/historian’s relationship to her subject(s), and the intersectionality of sexism, racism, and economic inequality. Benjamin’s Half in Shadow gives a full and surprising picture of the life of Nellie Y. McKay (1930-2006), an American literary scholar best known for her collaboration with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. McKay, a Black working-class woman, kept much of her private life in secret, creating a public persona as one of many strategies she used to navigate the primarily white male American academy while simultaneously lifting up Black scholarly and literary voices in the academy. Levenstein’s They Didn’t See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties takes a closer look at a time when many (including the cover of Time magazine) declared feminism dead. Instead, Levenstein uncovers a vital (and overlooked) transition period when multiracial and grassroots organizers across the globe (re)shaped the women’s movement. Hosted by ANN CAHILL. [rsvp required; see below]
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book images above.
DR. SHANNA GREENE BENJAMIN is a biographer and scholar who studies the literature, lives, and archives of Black women. Dr. Benjamin earned her Ph.D. in English and M.A. in Afro-American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; she received a B.A. in English from Johnson C. Smith University—a historically Black college in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is also a Mellon Mays undergraduate fellow who now serves on the UNCF/Mellon Board of Advisors. Dr. Benjamin currently lives with her family in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Authors Website
DR. LISA LEVENSTEIN is Director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and Associate Professor of History at UNC Greensboro. Her first book, A Movement Without Marches, won the Kenneth Jackson Book Award. She lives in Chapel Hill, NC.
Author Website
DR. ANN CAHILL is a professor of philosophy at Elon University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of feminist theory and philosophy of the body, and her scholarship has addressed topics such as sexual assault, miscarriage, beautification, and sex work. Her forthcoming book, Sounding Bodies: Identity, Injustice, and the Voice, co-authored with Christine Hamel, explores the social, political, and ethical meanings of voice as human-generated sound.
This event is sponsored by

Our Stories, Our Voices: Four Years On
2021-05-15 10:00 - 11:00 | VIRTUAL
Join Our Stories, Our Voices: 21 YA Authors Get Real About Injustice, Empowerment, and Growing Up Female in America editor AMY REED and contributors TRACY DEONN, AMBER SMITH, and IW GREGORIO as they look back on their contribution to Our Stories, Our Voices. We’ll take a closer look at how their perspectives have changed over the past four years and what they might say now if they were to write their essays all over again; and how and why their writing has changed since Our Stories, Our Voices was first published in 2018.
Sunday, 5/16 – Part 2 – Our Stories, Our Voices: Writing As Activism
Sunday, 5/16 – Your Story, Your Voice: A Writing Workshop

Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book images above.

AMY REED is the award-winning author of several novels for young adults, including The Nowhere Girls, The Boy and Girl Who Broke the World, Beautiful, Clean, and Crazy. Her newest book, the psychological thriller Tell Me My Name, is a near-future, gender-swapped retelling of The Great Gatsby. Amy is a feminist, mother, and Virgo who enjoys running, making lists, and wandering around the mountains of western North Carolina where she lives.
Author Website
TRACY DEONN is the New York Times bestselling author of Legendborn and a second-generation fangirl who grew up in North Carolina. Tracy has worked in live theater, video games, and K–12 education. When she’s not writing, Tracy speaks on panels at SFF conventions, reads fanfic, and keeps an eye out for ginger-flavored everything.
Author Website
AMBER SMITH is the New York Times bestselling author of the young adult novels The Way I Used to Be, The Last to Let Go, and Something Like Gravity. An advocate for increased awareness of gendered violence, as well as LGBTQ equality, she writes in the hope that her books can help to foster change and spark dialogue surrounding these issues. She grew up in Buffalo, New York, and now lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her wife and their ever-growing family of rescued dogs and cats.
Author Website
IW GREGORIO is a practicing surgeon by day, masked avenging YA writer by night. She is author of This is My Brain in Love, which was awarded the 2020 Schneider Family Book Award by the American Library Association. After getting her MD, she did her residency at Stanford, where she met the intersex patient who inspired her debut novel, None of the Above, which was a Lambda Literary Finalist, a Publishers Weekly Flying Start, and an ALA Rainbow List selection. She is proud to be a board member of interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth, and is a founding member of We Need Diverse Books. Her essays have been published in Newsweek, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Scientific American, among others.
Author Website

This event is sponsored by:

LIVE An Evening with Nnedi Okorafor
2021-05-14 19:00 - 20:00 | LIVE ZOOM
NNEDI OKORAFOR is a Nigerian-American author of Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism for children and adults. Her works include Who Fears Death, the Binti novella trilogy, The Book of Phoenix, “Akata”, “Lagoon” and “Ikenga”, and her latest novel, Remote Control. She is the winner of Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus and Lodestar Awards and her debut novel, Zahrah the Windseeker won the prestigious Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature. She has also written comics for Marvel, including Black Panther: Long Live the King, Wakanda Forever, the “Shuri” series and an Africanfuturist comic series Laguardia, as well as a short memoir, Broken Places and Outer Spaces. Additionally, she has co-written the adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed with Viola Davis and Kenyan film director Wanuri Kahiu. Nnedi holds a PhD in literature and two master’s degrees in journalism and literature. She lives with her daughter Anyaugo and family in Illinois. Hosted by DR. TARA GREEN, UNCG Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and the Linda Arnold Carlisle Excellence Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies. [rsvp & registration required; see below]
Author Website
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.

This event is made possible by the UNCG University Libraries.

Chefs Ricky Moore & Whitney Otawka
2021-05-14 18:00 - 19:00 | VIRTUAL
We’ll talk the craft of food with award winning chef and author WHITNEY OTAWKA as she shares her journey from the Mojave Desert in California to Cumberland Island, Georgia with stops along the way in Michelin starred kitchens and a season of Top Chef, and RICKY MOORE, who after a stint in the military attended the Culinary Institute of America, also worked in Michelin starred restaurants around the world, and competed in Iron Chef before deciding to return home to North Carolina to open his own seafood joint. Host DABNEY SANDERS chats with our chefs about seafood, a sense of place, family, and of course you won’t want to miss the discussion of Ben’s biscuits and the almighty pork chop. [rsvp required; see below]
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.
WHITNEY OTAWKA is a chef, writer, and author of The Saltwater Table: Recipes from the Coastal South. With more than 125 recipes, The Saltwater Table is a reflection of the cuisine Whitney has explored through her travels along the Coastal South and time as Executive Chef at Greyfield Inn on Cumberland Island. The cookbook reflects a modern perspective on southern flavors with a strong emphasis on vegetables and fresh ingredients. Her recipes have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Garden & Gun, and Culture. She is currently overseeing the restaurant development of the soon to be open Thompson Hotel in Savannah (Summer 2021).
Chef Website
RICKY MOORE is a self-professed evangelist of North Carolina seafood and owner of the popular Saltbox Seafood Joint restaurants in Durham, North Carolina. Taking inspiration from the famous wet markets in Singapore, Moore focuses purely on the food inspired by his native Carolina coast, and its traditional roadside fish shacks and camps. In 2007, during his tenure as Executive Chef at Agraia in Washington DC (now known as Founding Farmers), Moore’s reputation earned him a spot competing against Chef Michael Symon on “Iron Chef America.” Today Moore continues to fulfill his lifelong dream as an entrepreneur, professional, and preserver of North Carolina fisherman and foodways. Moore was born and raised in the North Carolina coastal town of New Bern, where catching and eating fresh fish and shellfish is a way of life. He draws inspiration from his Eastern North Carolina culinary background, as well as from culinary experiences across the globe.
Chef Website
DABNEY SANDERS is the Project Manager for the Downtown Greenway – a collaborative project of Action Greensboro and the City of Greensboro and Board Chair of the Greensboro Literary Organization, producer of the Greensboro Bound Literary Festival. Dabney grew up in Rhode Island, but has lived in North Carolina for more than 30 years and was named the 2019 Jim Roach Downtown Person of the Year by Downtown Greensboro. Dabney has a passion for food, is a self-taught cook, and has cooked professionally in the past, but now enjoys entertaining for friends, family, and to support community organizations. She lives in Fisher Park with her husband, Walker, two dogs Hudson and Scout, and 4 chickens Emma, Adelaide, Phoebe, and Violet.

Craft, Violence, and the Art of Storytelling with Rod Davis, John Hart, and Dennis McCarthy
2021-05-14 17:00 - 18:00 | VIRTUAL
Join us in conversation with novelists JOHN HART, ROD DAVIS, and DENNIS McCARTHY. Hart’s latest novel, The Unwilling, is a thriller framed around the consequences of the Vietnam War for those who served. It is described as “crime fiction at its most raw,” which aptly describes the work of novelist Rod Davis as well. Publisher’s Weekly describes Davis’s 2020 novel East of Texas, West of Hell as a “crime powerhouse–a maelstrom of meth-dealing, human trafficking, and white supremacy. Davis is a great guide through gritty Southern territory.” Dennis McCarthy’s novel, The Gospel According to Billy the Kid, moves an American tale of violence and redemption west to New Mexico. Of this debut novel, fellow Greensboro Bound author Ron Rash says, “this novel does what all of the best ones do: we enter them, but they also enter us, and they stay.” Hosts BRYAN GIEMZA and AMY WELDON talk craft, violence, and the art of storytelling with our three authors. [rsvp required; see below]
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book images above.
JOHN HART is the author of six New York Times bestsellers. The only author in history to win the Edgar Award for Best Novel consecutively, John has also won the Barry Award, the SIBA Award for Fiction, the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. His novels have been translated into thirty languages and can be found in more than seventy countries.
Author Website
ROD DAVIS is the recipient of the inaugural Fiction Award of the PEN Southwest Book Awards in 2005 for Corina’s Way, described by Kirkus Reviews as “a spicy bouillabaisse, New Orleans-set, in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor or John Kennedy Toole: a welcome romp, told with traditional Southern charm.” His PEN/Texas-award-winning essay, The Fate of the Texas Writer, is included in Fifty Years of the Texas Observer and his Texas Monthly story, Wal-marts Across Texas, is excerpted in True Stories by David Byrne. Davis has received numerous awards as a magazine editor and writer. He earned an M.A. in Government at Louisiana State University and studied at the University of Virginia before joining the Army in 1970, serving as a first lieutenant in South Korea. He lives in Texas.
Author Website
DENNIS McCARTHY has been a park ranger, ecologist, speechwriter, editor in chief, professor, and attorney. At work on his second novel, he and his wife and beagle live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
BRYAN GIEMZA, PHD, JD is an Associate Professor of Humanities and Literature in the Honors College at Texas Tech University. In addition to his teaching and research he serves as public scholar for the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World. Before coming to Texas Tech he was Director of the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
AMY WELDON is an Alabama native, professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa and the author, most recently, of Eldorado, Iowa: A Novel.
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Dirty Gold: The Rise and Fall of an International Smuggling Ring
2021-05-14 16:00 - 17:00 | VIRTUAL
An in-depth discussion with veteran investigative reporters KYRA GURNEY, NICHOLAS NEHAMAS, JAY WEAVER and JIM WYSS as host JOHN COX digs into their work to tell the story of death, drugs, and corruption within the gold mining industry within Latin America and the the impact the pursuit of greed has on the people caught both willingly and unwillingly within its wake. [rsvp required; see below]
Purchase books from our official bookseller, Scuppernong Books, by clicking book image above.
NICHOLAS NEHAMAS is an investigative reporter at the Miami Herald, where he was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that broke the Panama Papers in 2016. He and his Herald colleagues were also named Pulitzer finalists in 2019 for the series “Dirty Gold, Clean Cash.” He has co-authored two books, The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency and Dirty Gold: The Rise and Fall of an International Smuggling Ring. He joined the Herald in 2014, where he covered healthcare and real estate before joining the investigations team.
KYRA GURNEY is a journalist based in Washington, D.C. She has worked at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and at the Miami Herald, where she and her co-authors were finalists for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for “Dirty Gold, Clean Cash,” a series on the illegal gold trade. Before working at the Miami Herald, Kyra was a reporter at InSight Crime, a nonprofit investigative journalism outlet based in Colombia. Kyra has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
JAY WEAVER is an award-winning journalist who has covered the federal courts and produced major investigative projects at the Miami Herald for more than 20 years. In 2018, he collaborated with a team of Herald reporters on an investigative series about a multibillion-dollar money-laundering scheme involving Miami imports of tons of gold from South America mined by cocaine traffickers and other criminals, which was honored as a 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Explanatory Reporting. In 2001, Weaver was part of the Miami Herald team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for the paper’s coverage of the federal government’s seizure of Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez. Weaver received his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley in 1977 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.
JIM WYSS is a prize-winning journalist who has spent most of his career in Latin America. From 2011-2020 he was the Miami Herald’s South America correspondent based in Colombia, where he was also part of the reporting team that uncovered the Panama Papers and won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He now lives in Puerto Rico, where he covers the Caribbean for Bloomberg News. He has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University through the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship.
JOHN COX is the Director of UNC Charlotte’s Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Center. He earned his PhD in History from UNC Chapel Hill and has written and lectured widely on racism and genocide, human rights, and resistance to Nazism and other oppressive systems. He is the author of two books on fascism, genocide, and resistance: To Kill a People: Genocide in the 20th Century (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Circles of Resistance: Leftist, Jewish, and Youth Dissidence during the Third Reich (2009).
