This year the North Carolina Writers’ Network is a proud sponsor of the BookMARKS Festival of Books on Saturday, September 11, in Winston-Salem’s Downtown Arts District. We are particularly proud to be a lead sponsor for a reading and discussion by John Hart, author of The Last Child, Down River, and The King of Lies. I’ll also moderate an “Emerging Voices” panel discussion featuring first-time novelists Erica Eisdorfer, Kathleen Grissom, and Kim Wright.
Billy Collins, Frank Deford, Diana Gabaldon, Christopher McDougall, Kathy Patrick, and Charlie Pierce are some of the other authors who will be at BookMARKS, along with Network members Anjail Rashida Ahmad, Jack Riggs, Carol Roan, Emily Herring Wilson, and Judith Geary (if you’re a Network member and BookMARKS author I’ve forgotten, my apologies).
The Network will again have a display table at the festival, and we again need some volunteers to help us tell people about all that the Network offers North Carolina and its writers. If you would like to help out, please contact Ed Southern at ed@ncwriters.org.
That same weekend, the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival will take place in Burnsville, and will feature authors including Tony Earley, Paul Cuadros, Cathy Smith Bowers, Tommy Hays, Brian Lee Knopp, Joseph Bathanti, Judy Goldman, and Laura Hope-Gill.
In other news, former North Carolina Poet Laureate (and 2010 Spring Conference keynote speaker) Fred Chappell will receive the 2010 John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities on Friday, October 8. The ceremony, to be held at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is free and open to the public.
Finally, UNC-Wilmington alumna and lecturer Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams has won a 2010 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Congrats to Hannah.