AM: Thanks for the interview, Kimmery. You’re a medical doctor by training, correct? What kind of practice? And how did you manage to find the time to pen this novel, which, given its plot that involves medical school and residency, as well as its hospital settings, could only have been written, I think, by someone […]
Richard Rankin
January 31, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Richard Rankin has been the Anderson Davis Warlick Head of School at Gaston Day School for the last 17 years. He is the author of several books, including While There Were Still Wild Birds: A Personal History of Southern Quail Hunting, which is forthcoming in May 2018 with Mercer University Press. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He and his wife, Sarah […]
Allen Mendenhall Interviews Lorna Hollifield, Author of “Tobacco Sun”
August 14, 2017 by Leave a Comment
AM: Thanks, Lorna, for doing this interview. The title of your debut novel is Tobacco Sun. I want to ask you about that title, but first I want to quote from some opening lines of the book. “Tobacco,” you say, “a strangely fragile, yet willful crop, desperate for survivorship, proved it could somehow adapt to […]
August Read of the Month: “Hopscotch,” by Steve Cushman
August 10, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Claire Matturro Someone draws a hopscotch board on a sidewalk by a hospital in Greensboro, North Carolina. The hospital CEO with a Grinch persona orders it cleared off and a recently released felon, John Deaver, glad for his job as a janitor, erases it. But the chalk hopscotch board reappears on the sidewalk—again […]
“Brutal Silence,” by Margaret Dardess
May 18, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Donna Meredith Hidden in plain sight, human trafficking occurs in American neighborhoods where few expect that such a crime could exist, in the world of shopping malls and classy restaurants. But someone—a banker, a motel owner, a health care worker—surely suspects what is happening and fails to speak out. Margaret Dardess gives voice […]
May Read of the Month: “A Part of Me,” by Julia Nunnally Duncan
May 4, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Joseph Bathanti Julia Nunnally Duncan’s incantatory new volume of poems, A Part of Me, is the lyric inventory of all that has passed before the poet’s eye, committed deftly to the page, a litany of praise-songs and elegies. If Memory (Mnemosyne, the Greek Titan Goddess) is indeed the Mother of the Muses, then Duncan […]