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 […]
Joseph Bathanti
May 2, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Joseph Bathanti is former Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-14) and the author of several books of poetry, including Communion Partners; Anson County; The Feast of All Saints; This Metal (nominated for the National Book Award and winner of the Oscar Arnold Young Award); Land of Amnesia; Restoring Sacred Art (winner of the 2010 Roanoke Chowan Prize, awarded annually […]
March Read of the Month: “The Last Treasure,” by Erika Marks
March 8, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Donna Meredith Erika Marks’s latest novel, The Last Treasure, is a delicious romance, well-timed to capitalize on the current Hamilton frenzy. Hamilton assassin Aaron Burr’s daughter Theodosia is one of those lost aboard the Patriot, a schooner which disappeared without a trace in 1813 off the Carolina coast during a storm. The novel’s […]