Charlotte’s Women’s National Book Association Bibliofeast – 8 Talented Authors Come to Dinner
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In today’s episode number 65, we talk with eight talented authors who appeared at a moveable dinner known as Bibliofeast, sponsored by the Charlotte Chapter of the Women’s National Book Association. We explore the plots and themes of the books and the writing lives of the authors.
The authors who appear in the episode are Belle Boggs, THE GULF (Graywolf Press), Jim Hamilton, THE LAST ENTRY (Working Title Farm), Karla FC Holloway, A DEATH IN HARLEM (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press), Bruce Holsinger, THE GIFTED SCHOOL (Riverhead Books/PRH), Anna Jean Mayhew, TOMORROW’S BREAD (Kensington), Diane C. McPhail, THE ABOLITIONIST’S DAUGHTER, Jon Sealy, THE EDGE OF AMERICA (Haywire Books), and Amber Smith, SOMETHING LIKE GRAVITY.
We start the show discussing Bibliofeast and the origins and purpose of the Women’s National Book Association with Susan Walker, National Events Manager for WNBA National Reading Group Month.
Connect with Charlotte Chapter of Women’s National Book Association:
Website: https://wnba-charlotte.org/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WNBACharlotte/
Connect with Women’s National Book Association
Website: https://wnba-books.org/
National Reading Group Month and Great Group Reads Selections:
One component of National Reading Group Month is the annual curated list of books recommended for book clubs and reading groups. This list, the Great Group Reads Selections, is the work of a WNBA members committee which reads, discusses and chooses the final 20 books from a long list of about 60-80 books proposed to the committee by their publishers. The list can be used anywhere, anytime, by book clubs, libraries, bookstores, anyone interested. Details can be obtained from the NRGM website: http://nationalreadinggroupmonth.org/ggr_selections.html
The Bibliofeast Authors In Order of Appearance on the Show
Author Jim Hamilton
Jim Hamilton is the County Extension Director in Watauga County. He holds a PhD in Forestry from NC State and is an adjunct professor at Appalachian State University. Before settling in Boone, North Carolina, Jim was a forestry professor, a Peace Corps Volunteer, an environmental consultant, an A.M. country music DJ, and a volunteer fireman. While he’s written the requisite number of academic articles published in unreadable journals to warrant his credentials, this is his first fiction novel.
The Last Entry is painted in the woodland tones of western North Carolina’s rural mountains—a cultural crossroads of post-modern Appalachia where old-time traditions clash with a rapidly-changing world. Jim weaves his expertise of natural history into a story and characters which reflect the region’s burgeoning diversity, its struggles with poverty, and a black-market economy still tied to its land and forests. While originally from a small town in east central Alabama, he’s been hunting, planting, transplanting, consuming, and teaching about ginseng for the last 10 years in mountains of western North Carolina where he now calls home. The Last Entry is really a story about brotherhood, loss, and redemption. However, the narrative is entwined with the culture and tradition of ginseng hunting, which is still alive and well today in the Blue Ridge Mountains where the story is set.
Connect with Jim Hamilton:
https://www.facebook.com/jimvhamilton
Author Anna Jean Mayhew
AJ Mayhew’s career path has taken many turns, from court reporting to opera management to medical writing. All the time she was involved in these day jobs, she was writing fiction at night and on weekends, pieces that began as short stories and became novels. For twenty-five years she taught fiction writing at Duke University Continuing Education, at the ArtsCenter in Carrboro, and in her home. In 1987 she joined a group of writers in Chapel Hill, led by the inimitable Laurel Goldman, and is still in that group 32 years later. With the support and critique of her colleagues, A. J. has written two novels: The Dry Grass of August (2011, won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction) and her 2019 novel, Tomorrow’s Bread. An excerpt of that book was included in 27 Views of Charlotte: The Queen City in Prose and Poetry.
In 1961 Charlotte, North Carolina, the predominantly black neighborhood of Brooklyn is a bustling city within a city. Self-contained and vibrant, it has its own restaurants, schools, theaters, churches, and night clubs. There are shotgun shacks and poverty, along with well-maintained houses like the one Loraylee Hawkins shares with her young son, Hawk, her Uncle Ray, and her grandmother, Bibi. Loraylee’s love for Archibald Griffin, Hawk’s white father and manager of the cafeteria where she works, must be kept secret in the segregated South.
Loraylee has heard rumors that the city plans to bulldoze her neighborhood, claiming it’s dilapidated and dangerous. The government promises to provide new housing and relocate businesses. But locals like Pastor Ebenezer Polk, who’s facing the demolition of his church, know the value of Brooklyn does not lie in bricks and mortar. Generations have lived, loved, and died here, supporting and strengthening each other. Yet street by street, longtime residents are being forced out. And Loraylee, searching for a way to keep her family together, will form new alliances—and find an unexpected path that may yet lead her home.
Connect with Anna Jean Mayhew
Author Belle Boggs
Belle Boggs is the author of The Gulf: A Novel (a SIBA Okra pick); The Art of Waiting; and Mattaponi Queen: Stories. The Art of Waiting was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and was named a best book of the year by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, the Globe and Mail, Buzzfeed, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Mattaponi Queen, a collection of linked stories set along Virginia’s Mattaponi River, won the Bakeless Prize and the Library of Virginia Literary Award and was a finalist for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Orion, the Paris Review, Harper’s, Ecotone, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University, where she also directs the MFA program in creative writing.
With humor and empathy, The Art of Waiting author Belle Boggs plumbs the troubled waters dividing America in her debut novel, The Gulf. Marianne is in a slump: barely able to support herself teaching, not making progress on her poetry, about to lose her Brooklyn apartment. When her novelist ex-fiancé, Eric, and his venture capitalist brother, Mark, offer her a job directing a low-residency school for Christian writers at a motel they’ve inherited on Florida’s Gulf Coast, she can’t come up with a reason to say no.
The Genesis Inspirational Writing Ranch is born, and liberal, atheist Marianne is soon swimming in applications from writers whose beliefs she has always opposed, but whose money she’s glad to take. Mark eventually finds an investor in God’s Word God’s World, a business that develops for-profit schools for the Christian market, but their involvement becomes increasingly problematic. As unsavory allegations mount and with a hurricane bearing down on the ranch, Marianne must face the consequences of her decisions.
Connect with Belle Boggs
Author Karla FC Holloway
Karla FC Holloway is James B.Duke Professor of English at Duke University. She also holds appointments in the Law School, Women’s Studies and African & African American Studies. Her research and teaching interests focus on African American cultural studies, biocultural studies, gender, ethics and law. Professor Holloway is the author of eight books, including Passed On: African-American Mourning Stories (2002) and BookMarks–Reading in Black and White, A Memoir (2006) completed during a residency in Bellagio, Italy as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. BookMarks was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for non-fiction. Professor Holloway spent Spring 2008 as Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard University’s DuBois Institute. The book she completed during that fellowship, Private Bodies/Public Texts: Race, Gender, & a Cultural Bioethics was published in 2011 by Duke U Press. Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literatures published by Duke Press in 2014. Professor Holloway was recently elected to the Hastings Center Fellows Association–a selective group of leading researchers who have made a distinguished contribution to the field of bioethics. She has served as a member of Duke University’s Board of Trustee’s Committee on Honorary Degrees.
In A Death in Harlem, famed scholar Karla FC Holloway weaves a mystery in the bon vivant world of the Harlem Renaissance. Taking as her point of departure the tantalizingly ambiguous “death by misadventure” at the climax of Nella Larsen’s Passing, Holloway accompanies readers to the sunlit boulevards and shaded sidestreets of Jazz Age New York. A murder there will test the mettle, resourcefulness, and intuition of Harlem’s first “colored” policeman, Weldon Haynie Thomas.
Clear glass towers rising in Manhattan belie a city where people are often not what they seem. For some here, identity is a performance of passing—passing for another race, for another class, for someone safe to trust. Thomas’s investigation illuminates the societies and secret societies, the intricate code of manners, the world of letters, and the broad social currents of 1920s Harlem.
Connect with Karla Holloway:
https://www.karlaholloway.com/
Author Bruce Holsinger
Bruce Holsinger is a fiction writer and literary scholar based in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of The Gifted School (Riverhead Books, 2019); as well as A Burnable Book (2014) and The Invention of Fire (2015), award-winning historical novels published by William Morrow (HarperCollins). His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, Slate, and many other publications. His work has been featured several times on NPR (click here to listen to his interview with Robin Young of Here & Now).
Since 2005 he has taught in the Department of English at the University of Virginia, where he specializes in medieval literature and modern critical thought and serves as editor of the quarterly journal New Literary History. His nonfiction books have won major awards from the Modern Language Association, the Medieval Academy of America, and the American Musicological Society, and his academic work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.
This deliciously sharp novel captures the relentless ambitions and fears that animate parents and their children in modern America, exploring the conflicts between achievement and potential, talent and privilege.
Set in the fictional town of Crystal, Colorado, The Gifted School is a keenly entertaining novel that observes the drama within a community of friends and parents as good intentions and high ambitions collide in a pile-up with long-held secrets and lies. Seen through the lens of four families who’ve been a part of one another’s lives since their kids were born over a decade ago, the story reveals not only the lengths that some adults are willing to go to get ahead, but the effect on the group’s children, sibling relationships, marriages, and careers, as simmering resentments come to a boil and long-buried, explosive secrets surface and detonate. It’s a humorous, keenly observed, timely take on ambitious parents, willful kids, and the pursuit of prestige, no matter the cost.
Connect with Bruce Holsinger:
https://www.bruceholsinger.com/
Author Jon Sealy
Jon Sealy is a South Carolina native and currently lives in Richmond, Virginia. His stories have been published in numerous magazines and literary journals, including The South Carolina Review, The Normal School, PANK, and The Sun.
Jon is the author of the Whisky Baron (Hub City Press) and The Edge of America (Haywire Books), a SIBA OKRA pick.
Bobby West is on the edge. As chief financial officer for a Miami holding company and a CIA front, he has overleveraged his business in the go-go 1980s financial culture. He turns to a deal-with-the-devil money laundering operation with a local gangster, Alexander French—a deal which quickly goes south when $3 million goes missing. Now Mr. French, a group of Cuban exiles, and an Israeli smuggler named Adriana Chekhov are all after Bobby West to pay up. With echoes of Iran-Contra and the Orwellian surveillance state, The Edge of America is a stunning thriller about greed, power, and the limits of the American dream.
Connect with Jon Sealy:
Author Diane McPhail
Diane C. McPhail is an artist, writer, and minister. In addition to holding an M.F.A., an M.A., and D.Min., she has studied at the University of Iowa distance learning and the Yale Writers’ Workshop, among others. Diane is a member of North Carolina Writers’ Network and the Historical Novel Society. She lives in Highlands, North Carolina, with her husband, and her dog, Pepper.
Kensington Publishing announces the release of The Abolitionist’s Daughter, a vividly rendered, culturally important and unexpectedly personal debut novel by Diane C. McPhail. Set in Mississippi during the violent turmoil leading up to and just after the Civil War, The Abolitionist’s Daughter illuminates a corner of Southern history that’s little-known and rarely glimpsed: the experiences and struggles of those openly opposed to slavery in a time and place when the freeing of slaves was illegal, the suggestion of it potentially fatal. At the novel’s heart are three extraordinary women who refuse to compromise what they know to be right, as they negotiate the devastations of war, betrayal and a world depleted by the conflict of men: Emily, the daughter of an abolitionist; Ginny, a slave who was illegally educated alongside Emily; and Adeline, the mother of Emily’s husband.
Connect with Diane McPhail
https://www.dianemcphailauthor.com/
Author Amber Smith
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 partner and their ever-growing family of rescued dogs and cats.
In Something Like Gravity, Chris and Maia aren’t off to a great start.
A near-fatal car accident first brings them together, and their next encounters don’t fare much better. Chris’s good intentions backfire. Maia’s temper gets the best of her. But they’re neighbors, at least for the summer, and despite their best efforts, they just can’t seem to stay away from each other.
The path forward isn’t easy. Chris has come out as transgender, but he’s still processing a frightening assault he survived the year before. Maia is grieving the loss of her older sister and trying to find her place in the world without her. Falling in love was the last thing on either of their minds.
But would it be so bad if it happened anyway?
Connect with Amber Smith
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Making Mid-rolls Fun –Park Road Books
Our mid-roll guest this week, Sally Brewster, with Park Road Books, offers some book suggestions, Holding Onto Nothing, by Elizabeth Shelburne, and Running With Sherman, by Christopher McDougall.
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