2009-2010 Series

Mitchell Gold 

Thursday, January 28, 2010
PE Monroe Aud., 7:00pm
(Soledad O'Brien, CNN anchor and special correspondent, interviews Gold live on stage.)

Mitchell Gold is co-founder of the furniture company Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, a nationally recognized business that promotes tolerance and equality, and the creator of Faith in America, an organization dedicated to ending religion-based prejudice against the gay community. His 2008 publication Crisis confronts this issue through a collection of forty stories written by well-known and accomplished gay Americans and edited by Gold along with Mindy Drucker. Crisis promises to reveal the "personal, social, and religious pain and trauma of growing up gay in America" through the perspectives of its contributors, among them theologians, athletes, CEOs, and philanthropists.

> Complete Schedule

As we enter our third decade of high-quality literary programming, I want to thank Lenoir-Rhyne University for its support, which has allowed us to keep our events free and open to the public-especially in these challenging times. I also want to thank our Sponsors and our individual patrons for their belief in the importance of reading in our lives. The mission of the Visiting Writers Series is "to build a community of readers," and we invite you to join us through your financial support.

The VWS also benefits from having a talented and dedicated Steering Committee that helps select our authors, arrange the season, handle logistics, and plan for the future. This diverse group of passionate readers who care about the well-being of our community is responsible for the preeminence the Series now gratefully enjoys. In addition, we could not have made it to our 21st year without the confidence and cooperation of our many community partners, which this year include The Hickory Public Library and Centro Latino.

The VWS is also the lead organization for 2009-2010 The BIG Read (now in its fifth year). With the generous support of our ongoing BIG Read partners, Catawba Valley Community College, Catawba County Library System, and the Hickory Public Library, we will bring the internationally recognized Latina author Julia Alvarez to Hickory to discuss her book How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. We will provide facilitators for local book clubs and groups to lead discussions of the book in the spring of 2010. Please contact us if you would like to request a facilitator. Alvarez will also be this year's Little Read author. Every fourth grader in the county will receive their own copy to keep of How Tia Lola Came to Visit Stay and the LR School of Education will provide the teachers with curricular support.

By instilling a love of reading in children we are giving them a wonderful and powerful gift. Reading fosters and fortifies the mind, heart, and soul. And as many of you in our audience tonight can testify, reading never ceases to bring us pleasure and occasionally a truth we could not know any other way.

Dr. Rand Brandes, VWS Director