White Cross School

Longtime Friend of the Network Randall Kenan was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition today, discussing the late great James Baldwin.  Kenan has edited a new collection of Baldwin’s work, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings.  The audio will be available after 9 o’clock this morning.

City Lights Bookstore in Sylva will host a publication party this Sunday, August 8, at 5 p.m., in honor of the release of Echoes Across the Blue Ridge, the new anthology from our friends and fellow Network members in NetWest.

If you’re not familiar with NetWest, it’s short for NC Writers’ Network – West, a chapter of the Network for writers who live in North Carolina’s nine westernmost counties, as well as northwest South Carolina and northeast Georgia.  Congratulations to all those whose work appears in Echoes, but especially to Nancy Simpson and Glenda Beall for all their hard work on this project.

Echoes is available at bookstores and gift shops throughout southwestern North Carolina, and online at www.ncwriters.org or www.indiebound.org.

In other news, Winston-Salem’s Press 53 has launched Prime Number, a new literary magazine edited by Clifford Garstang.  You can read an interview with him here.

From the City of Raleigh Arts Commission:

The Piedmont Laureate program will be accepting applications from creative nonfiction writers for 2011! Authors of works including biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, travel writings, and new journalism are eligible to apply. Writers must be residents of Alamance, Durham, Orange and/or Wake counties. Deadline to apply is September 20, 2010.

The Piedmont Laureate program has, as its primary goal: “to promote awareness and heighten appreciation for excellence in the literary arts throughout the Piedmont region.” The program is dedicated to building a literary bridge for residents to come together and celebrate the art of writing, enriching the lives of all our citizens.

The 2011 Piedmont Laureate will receive a $6,500 honorarium to present readings and workshops, encourage creative writing, and promote literature at select public events.  The 2009 Laureate was poet Jaki Shelton Green, and the current Laureate is novelist Zelda Lockhart.

For more information about the laureate program, complete guidelines and application form, visit www.piedmontlaureate.com.

Congratulations to the Network’s good friend Nancy Olson, owner of Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books & Music, who will receive a 2010 Raleigh Medal of the Arts in a ceremony on October 6.  Nancy has done as much for North Carolina’s writers, and North Carolina’s literary culture, as anyone, and this honor is well-deserved.

That’s right – if you come to the 2010 Squire Summer Writing Residency, not only do you get to spend a weekend learning, working, and socializing with other talented and dedicated writers from across the state (and beyond), but you get to do so in air-conditioned comfort.  The Residency’s registration deadline is Monday, so sign up now by visiting www.ncwriters.org or by calling 336.293.8844.

In other news of interest (though I realize that, today, nothing is more interesting than air conditioning), the Charlotte Observer reports that Charlotte’s arts groups have survived the recession largely by cutting expenses.  Funny how that works.

On a less obvious note, today’s Shelf Awareness linked to a PC World article about a study that found that reading a good old-fashioned printed book is faster than reading a fancy new e-reader device.

Finally, I visited friends in the mountains on Monday, and one of them was reading the novel Bright Leaf by Foster Fitz-Simons.  I’m sad and ashamed to admit that I had never heard of this book, but I look forward to finding a copy and seeing what I’ve missed.  Can anyone give me a reader’s report, and tell me what they think of this novel?