Events
Entering the “herb world” can be intimidating; if you live in the city or have never spent much time in the wilderness or on a farm, learning about plants can seem impossible. And if you desire a more natural approach to healing for yourself and your family, today’s herb books, filled with cultivation tables, harvest techniques, dye charts, and aromatherapy guides, can seem overwhelming.
This book is a welcome entry point for those wishing to experience the beauty and simplicity of natural herbal remedies safely and easily. By focusing on just thirteen foundation herbs, you can easily jump into the world of herbs while still finding a wide range of remedies and recipes. With something for everyone in the family—men, women, and children—these simple and effective recipes can be made to help ease tummy aches, calm anxiety, moisturize skin, and more.
After fourteen years as a professional medical herbalist, and as an avid crafter and homesteader, author Holly Bellebuono shares the joy of identifying plants, making handmade remedies, and experiencing a healthy lifestyle. Discover the pleasure of crafting your family’s own useful medicines with simplicity and joy.
Binocular Vision includes 18 stories from the previous three books and three early stories never collected.
It includes also 13 new stories, in which Edith Pearlman's favorite theme of accommodation continues, as well as the themes of young love, old love, thwarted love, and love denied; of Jews and their dilemmas; of marriage, family, death, and betrayal. The settings are Maine, Central America, Hungary, Tsarist Russia, and the town of Godolphin, Massachusetts, by now familiar to Pearlman's readers.
In many of the tales there are heroes, heroines, and important secondaries who live without partners. Their singlehood is not the result of a pathology or disappointment but of preference. These characters are among Pearlman's own favorites.
Edith Pearlman has published more than 250 works of short fiction and short non-fiction in national magazines, literary journals, anthologies, and on-line publications. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Collection, New Stories from the South, and The Pushcart Prize Collection – Best of the Small Presses.
Author Sarah Bowen Shea presents Train Like a Mother: How to Get Across Any Finish Line – and Not Lose Your Family, Job, or Sanity, providing insight, information, and encouragement to runners and walkers of all kinds as they plan their fitness regimen.
Sarah and co-author Dimity McDowell have cultivated an engaged, spirited tribe of women runners with their signature wit, candor, and ability to connect. Their first book, Run Like a Mother, was called a “bible for active parents” by The New York Times.
Paul and Angela Knipple's culinary tour of the contemporary American South celebrates the flourishing of global food traditions "down home." Drawing on their firsthand interviews and reportage from Richmond to Mobile and enriched by a cornucopia of photographs and original recipes, the Knipples present engaging, poignant profiles of a host of first-generation immigrants from all over the world who are cooking their way through life as professional chefs, food entrepreneurs and restaurateurs, and home cooks.
Beginning the tour with an appreciation of the South's foundational food traditions--including Native American, Creole, African American, and Cajun--the Knipples tell the fascinating stories of more than forty immigrants who now call the South home. Not only do their stories trace the continuing evolution of southern foodways, they also show how food is central to the immigrant experience. For these skillful, hardworking immigrants, food provides the means for both connecting with the American dream and maintaining cherished ethnic traditions. Try Father Vien's Vietnamese-style pickled mustard greens, Don Felix's pork ribs, Elizabeth Kizito's Ugandan-style plantains in peanut sauce, or Uli Bennevitz's creamy beer soup and taste the world without stepping north of the Mason-Dixon line.
The Carolina African American Writers' Collective (CAAWC), based in Raleigh, is a workshop and readers' group consisting of poets, fiction writers, dramatists, essayists, journalists, children's writers, graphic artists, publicists, photographers, teachers, librarians, archivists, and editors who meet monthly to critique one another's work, read and discuss books by African American authors, and share information about the literary scene. CAAWC also serves as a literary and cultural arts liaison for the community.
The following writers will be featured at the event:
Carolyn Beard Whitlow is Dana Professor of English at Guilford College.
Linda Beatrice Brown is the author of Black Angels.
Adrienne Christian's poetry has appeared in Alimentum, Miller's Pond, and Turtle Quarterly.
L. Teresa Church penned her first poem at age sixteen. Her writings have appeared in African American Review, Drumvoices Revue, Pembroke Magazine, North Carolina Literary Review.
Sandra Y. Govan retired from the English Department at UNC Charlotte. Govan is a founding member of the Wintergreen Women Writer’s Collective. She has pieces published in Shaping Memories: Reflections of African American Women Writers, My Soul is a Witness, Father Songs, and Erotique Noire.
Brian H. Jackson's writing appeared in Fertile Ground: Memories & Visions and North Carolina A & T State University journals All That Jazz and Perceptions.
Chantal James is a creative Fulbright Fellow and the author of the
novel Fes is a Mirror.
Grace Ocasio won the Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka Prize in Poetry in 2011, and she was a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry in 2010. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle.
Tanure Ojaide is the author of The Beauty I Have Seen and The
Tale of the Harmattan.
Darrell “SCIPOET” Stover received an M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University, founded the Spoken Word Performance Poetry Ensemble in Washington, DC.
L. Lamar Wilson, Cave Canem fellow and winner of the 2011 Beau Boudreaux Poetry Prize, is an English PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Gideon Young lives in Efland, North Carolina. He is a member of the Carolina African-American Writers’ Collective. His Masters in Elementary Education is from North Carolina State U.
What Writers Do, with its behind the scenes look at the craft of writing, celebrates the series that continues to connect great writers with delighted readers.
For more than 20 years the Visiting Writers Series at Lenoir-Rhyne University has championed great writers -- both established and emerging. Rand Brandes, series founder and editor, and Anthony Abbott, this volume's editor, have brought together some of the series' most beloved and memorable writers to form a collection that includes: new prose by Bret Lott, Mark Powell and Dori Sanders; new poems by Sharon Olds, Fred Chappell and Billy Collins; and classic memoir excerpts by the likes of John Updike, Reynolds Price and Frank McCourt. More than words, this volume also features photographs of the writers and where they work.
Editors Rand Brandes and Anthony Abbott will be visiting the story to talk more about this literary project.
Rand Brandes, Lenoir-Rhyne University's Martin Luther Stevens Professor of English, is the founder and Director of the Visiting Writers Series. A recipient of two Senior Fulbright Fellowships to work with Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney in Dublin, Brandes has published widely in Modern and Contemporary British and Irish Poetry.
Originally from San Francisco, Anthony S. Abbott received his A.B. from Princeton, and Ph.D. from Harvard. Former chair of the English Depar tment at Davidson College, he is now the Charles A. Dana Professor of English Emeritus. He has authored four critical studies, two novels and five books of poetry, including the Pulitzer-nominated The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat.
In the title poem of The Swing Girl, a Greek burial relic with an image of a small child on her swing suggests the ability to move between present culture and the ghosts of history, between modern metaphor and the rhetoric of myth. Katherine Soniat celebrates this fluidity and the detached yet vulnerable perception that comes with it: “The territory that girl could cover, her eyes peering birdlike / across the grove. The air, a vector.”
Soniat’s new collection contemplates the present through the fragmented lens of history. She swings the reader out across time, to ancient Greece and China, and into the chaos of contemporary war in Serbia and Iraq. The ever-changing point of view disorients, so that ultimately even daylight seems uncertain: “. . . the sun, a far smear above, granular and moony.” Loss provides the substance of history and myth, sounding the dark, minor key of elegy for lives and geographies cracking under pressure.
In Soniat’s poems the precarious puzzle of this world shatters, only to begin again in startling new ways: “the story of the mountain always points somewhere else/ elusive as the tawny lion disappearing behind the next / high crag.”
Summoner-King Tris Drayke takes what remains of the Margolan army north to fight a war Margolan is ill-prepared to fight, as reports from spies confirm Tris' worst fear. A new threat rises across the sea: a dark summoner who intends to make the most of the Winter Kingdoms' weakness.
And in Isencroft, King Donelan is assassinated and Tris's wife, Kiara, will now have no choice except to return and claim the crown. But the rogue mage's agents will go to any length to prevent her from reaching her goal.
Kiara and Tris must discover the truth behind the dark summoner, the mysterious power surrounding their infant son, and face the awesome power of the Dread as they rise from their barrows for the first time in over a millennium.
Shackled in the dungeon of a macabre castle with no recollection of her past, a young woman finds herself falling in love with her captor – the estate’s master. Yet, placing her trust in him before she regains her memory and unravels the castle’s wicked truths would be a catastrophe.
Far away at Pemberley, the Darcys happily gather to celebrate the marriage of Kitty Bennet. But a dark cloud sweeps through the festivities: Georgiana Darcy has disappeared without a trace. Upon receiving word of his sister’s likely demise, Darcy and wife, Elizabeth, set off across the English countryside, seeking answers in the unfamiliar and menacing Scottish moors.
How can Darcy keep his sister safe from the most sinister threat she has ever faced when he doesn’t even know if she’s alive? True to Austen’s style and rife with malicious villains, dramatic revelations and heroic gestures, this suspense-packed mystery places Darcy and Elizabeth in the most harrowing situation they have ever faced – finding Georgiana before it is too late.
The sole survivor of the Black Saturday massacre, young Ziad Hadhari vows vengeance against the Christian perpetrators in Lebanon’s civil war. But when the vigilante Othman orders Ziad to murder innocent Christian students, he cannot shoot. His father beats him for cowardice.
Ziad falls in love with Sophia, a Westernized Christian whose family plans to emigrate to America. Fundamentalist enforcers drag Ziad and Sophia from his car and chop off their hair. As wartime Beirut devolves into a hell where feral dogs feed on corpses in the streets, Ziad vows to follow his traumatized girlfriend to the US. Many thousands apply for visas, but precious few are granted. Will the American gatekeepers in Damascus, Syria admit Ziad to the States, or is he doomed to the violent insanity of his homeland?
West Trade Review is published each spring by Johnson and Wales University, and strives to put forth the best contemporary writing and artwork.
The journal publishes a mix of established and up-and-coming writers. Our goal: To share the best art from both emerging and established creative minds on campus, in Charlotte and beyond. The authors in attendance will be:
Matt Sailor is Editor-in-Chief of New South, Georgia State Univeristy's Journal of Art and Literature. He is currently pursuing his MFA in fiction at Georgia State and resides in Atlanta, GA.
Kerry Anne Williams currently resides in Chapel Hill, NC, and is a graduate of UNC. She writes young adult novels and children's books.
Alisha Gard, a California native, currently resides in Carrboro, NC, and attends UNC-Chapel Hill. She has been twice awarded prizes in the Independent Weekly Annual Poetry Contest and recently was an Honorable Mention in the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival.
A native of Brooklyn, NY, Emily Banks currently attends UNC-Chapel Hill and is an intern for the Carolina Quarterly.
Leah Robinson is a fun-loving, high-spirited young lady who is the daughter of the well-known bishop of Hattiesville Community Church. She seems to have it all: wonderful friends, a near-perfect life, and a wonderful fiancé, Grant Sturdivant, with whom she is deeply in love. Grant is in the Army and is stationed in Germany. Before he comes home, she begins planning their dream wedding. After Leah suffers a significant headache one day that put her in the hospital for an indefinite amount of time, her friends begin to worry about her and whether or not she and Grant will still get married. Meanwhile, Janis Mitchell, Grant's ex, is jealous of Leah and her relationship with Grant and does everything in her power to break them up.
Will Leah ever recover from her illness and marry the love of her life? Will Janis succeed at breaking up Grant and Leah for her own selfish gain? In this compelling novel by first-time author Cheryl J. McCullough, you will follow Leah and Grant, as well as their family and friends, as they face adversity and persevere in spite of how life happens. The Wedding Party is a dynamic story about relationships with a surprising twist ending that you won't want to miss.
Library Journal says The Iguana Tree “recalls the work of John Steinbeck.” Kirkus Reviews calls it “exceptional … a haunting tale of hope and heartbreak.” Michel Stone’s debut novel, set against the backdrop of illegal immigration, is one family’s story of fateful decisions, risky border crossings, and a struggle for humanity.
Set amid the perils of illegal border crossings, The Iguana Tree is the suspenseful saga of Lilia and Hector, who separately make their way from Mexico into the United States, seeking work in the Carolinas and a home for their infant daughter.
Michel Stone's harrowing novel meticulously examines the obstacles each faces in pursuing a new life: manipulation, rape, and murder in the perilous commerce of border crossings; betrayal by family and friends; exploitation by corrupt officials and rapacious landowners on the U.S. side; and, finally, the inexorable workings of the U.S. justice system.
Hector and Lilia meet Americans willing to help them with legal assistance and offers of responsible employment, but their illegal entry seems certain to prove their undoing. The consequences of their decisions are devastating. In the end, The Iguana Tree is a universal story of loss, grief, and human dignity.
A lyrical, gorgeously written novel by a talented newcomer, Susan Woodring’s Goliath is set in a declining North Carolina furniture manufacturing town and focuses on the life and longing of Rosamond Rogers, secretary to the scion of the Harding Company, who has just—to the surprise of all but Rosamond—committed suicide.
When fourteen-year-old Vincent Bailey stumbles upon the body of Percy Harding, Goliath’s most important citizen, near the railroad tracks one perfect autumn afternoon, the tragic death seems literally unbelievable: how could it have been a suicide? Only Harding’s secretary, Rosamond, might have had a glimmer, but that glimmer just tugs at her, urges her to find out more. Harding isn’t the first person to leave Rosamond: everybody does, from her husband Hatley, who walked out on her years ago; to her complicated daughter Agnes, whose girlhood bedroom was papered with the maps of the places she wanted to escape to.
Brought to life by a cast of characters as varied and rich as in any fiction—from Clyde Winston, the town’s police chief, to Goliath’s self-taught preacher Ray, to Percy Harding’s unmoored widow Lela—Goliath’s appeal is as memorable as Elizabeth Strout’s Crosby, Maine, or Richard Russo’s Empire Falls.
It’s No Accident, a new book by pediatric urologist Dr. Steve J. Hodges, explains why bedwetting and accidents are on the rise and why they go improperly treated. It’s only normal for kids to have potty accidents, right? Not necessarily. Pediatricians routinely assure stressed-out parents that their child’s wetting episodes are no big deal, when in fact, potty problems are an epidemic in the U.S. and can develop into lasting medical issues if left untreated.
Sam Talbot is a professional chef, fan favorite of Bravo's Top Chef, restaurateur, surfer, painter, philanthropist, and, since the age of 12, type 1 diabetic. Yet he has not let the disease stop him from living a rich life packed with energy, adventure, and achievement—culinary and otherwise. In his first, much-anticipated book, he recounts how diabetes has affected but not compromised his life or career, and he shares his own tips—alongside those from other famous diabetics like Halle Berry, Larry King, and Tommy Lee—on how to handle everything from work and hobbies to relationships and travel with discipline and enthusiasm.
To round out this advice, he offers bits of foodie wisdom and 75 innovative recipes for fresh, all-natural dishes anybody, diabetic or not, can prepare and enjoy.
Heartfelt, entertaining, and backed by real-life experience and solid medical expertise, The Sweet Life will give readers hope, inspiration, and the proof they need to realize that life with diabetes isn’t about diabetes: It’s about living.
The Carolina Conspiracy is made up of mystery authors from North and South Carolina who share a taste for murder in their work. Authors Joyce and Jim Lavene, Linda Lovely, Doug Walker, Lynette Hall Hampton and Kathleen Delaney will talk about their characters, books and ideas. Refreshments will be served.
Joyce and Jim Lavene are a married writing couple who live in North Carolina with their family. They get help from their cat, Quincy, and their big puppy, Rudi, who they rescued in 2010. They have been writing together since 1994 and published since 1999. Last year marked their 52nd book in print. They enjoy writing mysteries but are at home with fantasy, romance and non-fiction. The couple both work for their small, hometown newspaper, The Weekly Post. They are active in Sisters-in-Crime and Mystery Writers of America.
Doug Walker (pen name is D L Walker) lives in Kannapolis with his wife Wendy, son Chris, and daughters Kathi and Holly. His 1st novel, Scaffold, is about a corrupt wrestling group that has a tragic accident during a PPV in Charlotte, and the investigation that follows. The sequel, Murder in Mill Town, is will be based in Kannapolis.
Lynette Hall Hampton was born and raised in North Carolina and still lives with her cat, Jefferson. She calls North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina her second home because she owned a condo there for over twenty-five years. She has had more than 400 articles, short stories and poetry, three children’s books published, one of which is being re-released this summer. She also has a non-fiction writing book out.
Kathleen Delaney grew up in Glendale, California. Her first novel, Dying For A Change, was named a finalist in the St. Martin’s Malice Domestic contest, and was accepted for publication by Publish America. The third book in the Ellen McKenzie series will be out in July, the fourth is almost finished, and there are more in the pipeline. There have been several short stories, one of which, “The Trip” will appear in central coast anthology due about the same time as Dessert.
