Greensboro Bound

A Conversation with Jill McCorkle
2020-08-01 19:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York) | ZOOM
Join Julia Ridley-Smith, in conversation with Jill McCorkle, author of Life After Life, Carolina Moon, Going Away Shoes, and her latest work, Hieroglyphics (Algonquin Books, July 28, 2020)
Grab your copy at Scuppernong Books today!
HOW TO WATCH
Zoom
Meeting ID: 841 4847 5761
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A mesmerizing novel about the burden of secrets carried across generations.
Lil and Frank married young, launched into courtship when they bonded over how they both—suddenly, tragically— lost a parent when they were children. Over time, their marriage grew and strengthened, with each still wishing for so much more understanding of the parents they’d lost prematurely.
Now, after many years in Boston, they’ve retired to North Carolina. There, Lil, determined to leave a history for their children, sifts through letters and notes and diary entries—perhaps revealing more secrets than Frank wants their children to know. Meanwhile, Frank has become obsessed with what might have been left behind at the house he lived in as a boy on the outskirts of town, where a young single mother, Shelley, is just trying to raise her son with some sense of normalcy. Frank’s repeated visits to Shelley’s house begin to trigger memories of her own family, memories that she’d hoped to keep buried. Because, after all, not all parents are ones you wish to remember.
Hieroglyphics reveals the difficulty of ever really knowing the intentions and dreams and secrets of the people who raised you. In her deeply layered and masterful novel, Jill McCorkle deconstructs and reconstructs what it means to be a father or a mother, and what it means to be a child piecing together the world around us, a child learning to make sense of the hieroglyphics of history and memory.
JILL MCCORKLE‘s first two novels were released simultaneously when she was just out of college, and the New York Times called her “a born novelist.” Since then, she has published six novels and four collections of short stories, and her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories several times, as well as The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Five of her books have been New York Times Notable books, and her most recent novel, Life After Life, was a New York Times bestseller. She has received the New England Booksellers Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. She has written for the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, the Atlantic, and other publications. She was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard, where she also chaired the department of creative writing. She is currently a faculty member of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and is affiliated with the MFA program at North Carolina State University.

JULIE RIDLEY SMITH Julia teaches in the English Department at UNC Greensboro and is the former editor of Inch magazine and former associate editor at Bull City Press. She worked for almost twenty years as a freelance editor of academic books for university presses. A firm believer that art is for everyone and helps people build stronger communities, she enjoys giving tours as a volunteer docent at the Weatherspoon Art Museum. Her short stories and essays have appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, American Literary Review, Arts and Letters, the Carolina Quarterly, Chelsea, Ecotone, Electric Literature, the Greensboro Review, the New England Review, Southern Cultures, and The Southern Review, among other places. Her book and art reviews have been published in Art Papers, Our State, the Raleigh News and Observer, and elsewhere.

Tar Heel Lightnin': How Secret Stills and Fast Cars Made North Carolina the Moonshine Capital of the World
2020-08-14 19:00 - 20:00
Pour yourself a drink and join Kathleen Purvis as she chats with Daniel S. Pierce about his latest book, Tar Heel Lightnin’: How Secret Stills and Fast Cars Made North Carolina the Moonshine Capital of the World.

Get your copy at Scuppernong Books, and grab Kathleen’s Distilling the South: A Guide to Southern Craft Liquors and the People Who Make Them while you’re there!
How to Watch
Zoom
Meeting ID: 823 1726 9378
Password: [REDACTED]
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From the late nineteenth century well into the 1960s, North Carolina boasted some of the nation’s most restrictive laws on alcohol production and sale. For much of this era, it was also the nation’s leading producer of bootleg liquor. Over the years, written accounts, popular songs, and Hollywood movies have turned the state’s moonshiners, fast cars, and frustrated Feds into legends. But in Tar Heel Lightnin’, Daniel S. Pierce tells the real history of moonshine in North Carolina as never before. This well-illustrated, entertaining book introduces a surprisingly varied cast of characters who operated secret stills and ran liquor from the swamps of the Tidewater to Piedmont forests and mountain coves. From the state’s earliest days through Prohibition to the present, Pierce shows that moonshine crossed race and economic lines, linking men and women, the rebellious and the respectable, the oppressed and the merely opportunistic. As Pierce recounts, even churchgoing types might run shipments of “that good ol’ mountain dew” when hard times came and there was no social safety net to break the fall.
Folklore, popular culture, and changing laws have helped fuel a renaissance in making and drinking commercial moonshine, and Pierce shows how today’s producers understand their ties to the past. Above all, this book reveals that moonshine’s long, colorful history features surprises that can change how we understand a state and a region.
DANIEL S. PIERCE the author of six books, including Real NASCAR: White Lightning, Red Clay, and Big Bill France. He serves as Interdisciplinary Distinguished Professor of the Mountain South and resident professional hillbilly at the University of North Carolina Asheville where he teaches courses on the South, Appalachia, North Carolina, and the National Parks.
KATHLEEN PURVIS is a James Beard Award nominated author and food journalist with an impressive resume of publications, including Our State Magazine, the Charlotte Observor, Garden & Gun, Southern Living, and she was listed Saveur’s 10th Annual “Top 100”. Her books include, Distilling the South: A Guide to Southern Craft Liquors and the People Who Make Them (UNC Press, 2018).
RECIPES FOR YOUR PLEASURE

(from Daniel)
Amos Owens’s (legendary Rutherford county moonshinder) Cherry Bounce

3 parts good, stout NC corn whiskey (legal these days!)
1 part good, fresh cherry juice
1 part sourwood honey (or substitute with simple syrup)

Crimson Letters: Voice from Death Row, Tessie Castillo with special guest Jon Powell and co-author Michael (Alim) Braxton
2020-08-20 16:30 - 18:30
Join us in a critical four-part conversation on criminal justice and death penalty reform, racial and socio-economic inequality, and quite simply, the human dignity that each of us deserves.
Each of Tessie’s four co-authors and a special guest will join us for a live call-in four successive events.
How to Watch
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Meeting ID: 858 3167 8194
Passcode: [REDACTED]
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AUGUST 20
Topic: What would ideal criminal justice reform look like?
Discussion: People often throw around the term “criminal justice reform,” but what exactly does that mean? We will discuss the concept of “restorative justice,” which focuses not just on punishment, but on repairing the harm caused by criminal behavior. Often this means bringing victims, offenders and the community together to create solutions that offer repair and closure and accountability. What can ordinary citizens do to support restorative justice or criminal justice reform efforts in their communities?
Special Guest: Jon Powell, Director of the Restorative Justice Clinic at Campbell University + co-author Michael J. Braxton, aka Alim

About Crimson Letters: What started as a volunteer journaling class in late 2013 would grow into genuine, sincere, and heartfelt friendships with several men on North Carolina’s Death Row. Tessie Castillo’s collaborative work, Crimson Letters: Voices from Death Row, gives readers stark insight into the utter agony and dehumanization of long-term incarceration, as well as stories of friendship, family, and finding life after a death sentence.
Get your copy of Tessie’s Crimson Letters: Voices from Death Row at Scuppernong Books.

TESSIE CASTILLO is a freelance journalist based in Raleigh, North Carolina. She specializes in criminal justice , drug policy, and harm reduction. In 2014 she became one of the first members of the public invited inside North Carolina’s Death Row. This extraordinary opportunity, as well as the correspondence she developed with several death row residents, helped launch her passion for criminal justice reform. Crimson Letters: Voice from Death Row is her first book.

JON POWELL serves as the director of the Restorative Justice Clinic at Campbell University. The program receives referrals from the juvenile justice system, juvenile court, Wake County Schools and the Capital Area Teen Court program. Part of the mission of the Restorative Justice Clinic is to help spread the word of Restorative Justice throughout the state of North Carolina and to assist others in the state in starting Restorative Justice programming. Jon has spoken on many occasions to various groups on the topic of Restorative Justice and has assisted organizations in starting mediation programs based on the Campbell model. Prior to working with the project, Jon practiced law in Wake and Harnett counties. His primary focus was in criminal defense with an emphasis on juvenile law.

MICHAEL JEROME BRAXTON, also known as Alim, is a rapper and spiritual leader on North Carolina’s Death Row. A reformed prisoner known as Rome Alone in the rap world, he has the distinction of being the only rapper in the world to release music from Death Row. He is a contributing playwright for “Serving Life”, a play about the inner thoughts of men facing the death penalty. He is also a recording artist with several artist with several songs currently on Sound Cloud. https://soundcloud.com/rromealone He has an upcoming album entitled, “Mercy On My Soul”. He serves as Iman and spiritual leader for the Muslim Men of Central Prison’s Death Row. You can find him on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram at @rromealone
