2010-2011 Authors

 

 

An Evening with John Feinstein

Friday, September 10, 2010
P.E. Monroe Auditorium, 7:00pm

(Mike Collins interviews Feinstein live on stage for a future broadcast of WFAE's Charlotte Talks.)  

John Feinstein is one of the nation's most successful and prolific sports authors who has written twenty-four books to date. His most recent work, Are You Kidding Me?, written with Rocco Mediate, was released on May 18, 2009. In addition, he is an award-winning columnist and regular contributor in both radio and television.

His works include the two top best-selling non-fiction sports books in history. In 1995, he published the all-time best seller A Good Walk Spoiled, a year inside life on the PGA Tour as told through seventeen players on the PGA Tour. Just behind that in sales is A Season on the Brink, which chronicled a year in the life of the Indiana basketball team and its enigmatic coach, Bob Knight. The book's chart-topping success was also adapted to film with an ESPN production of a made-for TV movie of the same title.

Feinstein's books take his readers into places they would not normally be allowed to go. A Season on the Brink looked into the Indiana locker room, team practice sessions, Knight's office, on the team bus and airplanes as Feinstein traveled with the team.  In intricate detail, Feinstein vividly depicted life inside a championship college basketball team, a style which has become a trademark for nearly all of his books. 

Perhaps one of his most poignant books, Caddy for Life: The Bruce Edwards Story was released in 2004.  In that book Feinstein writes about the life and final days of Tom Watson's caddy, Bruce Edwards, who had been diagnosed with ALS, also known as the deadly Lou Gehrig's disease. Early on, the book was identified as a great candidate to be adapted to film, and Feinstein's long-time friend Terry Hanson led that effort on John's behalf. They engaged the prestigious William Morris Agency and commissioned a screenplay in conjunction with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's production company, Live Planet. The script was optioned by Disney, who considered either ABC or ESPN for air and the body of work presently is still in development. 

John Feinstein is a 1977 graduate of Duke University and spent eleven years as a sports and political reporter with the Washington Post. He has also contributed to Sports Illustrated, the National Sports Daily, ESPN, CBS Sports, and Golf Digest. Presently he appears regularly on-air at the Golf Channel and National Public radio and writes for the Washington Post, Golf Digest, and the Sporting News. He resides in Potomac, MD, and Shelter Island, NY.

 

 

 

An Evening of Poetry & Irish Music:
Cathy Smith Bowers 
Joan McBreen
Rhett Iseman Trull (LRU Poet-in-Residence)

Thursday, September 16, 2010
P. E. Monroe Auditorium, 7:00pm

(Public Reception with Irish music and book signing following in lobby.)

Cathy Smith Bowers was selected as the Poet Laureate of North Carolina in 2010. She is a native of South Carolina and a winner of the 1990 General Electric Award for Younger Writers and a South Carolina Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared widely in publications such as The Altantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, The Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and many others. Bowers' first book, The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas, was published in 1992 as the first winner of the Texas Tech University Press First-book Competition in their Poetry Award Series. Iris Press republished The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas in 1997. Iris Press also published Bowers' second book, Traveling in Time of Danger, in 1999 and her third book, A Book of Minutes, in 2004. Bowers teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Queens University of Charlotte.

 

Joan McBreen is from Sligo, Ireland. Her poetry collections are: The Wind Beyond the Wall (Story Line Press, 1990), A Walled Garden in Moylough(Story Line Press and Salmon Poetry, 1995), Winter in the Eye: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2003) and Heather Island (Salmon Poetry, 2009). Her anthology The White Page / An Bhileog Bhán: Twentieth-Century Irish Women Poets was published by Salmon in 1999 and is in its third reprint. Her CD, The Long Light on the Land: Selected Poems read to a background of traditional Irish airs and classical music, was produced by Ernest Lyons Productions, Castlebar, County Mayo in 2004. Joan McBreen's 2009 publications include her fourth poetry collection,Heather Island and this anthology. Together with her ongoing involvement with Irish literary festivals such as the Yeats Summer School, Clifden Arts Week, Listowel Writers' Week, and The Cúirt International Festival of Literature, since 2007 she has been Literary Advisor and co-ordinator of the Oliver St. John Gogarty Literary Festival at Renvyle House Hotel, Connemara, Co. Galway.

 

Rhett Iseman Trull is the Lenoir-Rhyne University Visiting Poet-in-Residence in the spring of 2011. Her first book of poetry, The Real Warnings (Anhinga Press, 2009), received the 2008 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2008, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other publications. Her awards include prizes from the Academy of American Poets and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. She received her B.A. from Duke University and her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she was a Randall Jarrell Fellow. She and her husband publish the poetry journal Cave Wall in Greensboro, North Carolina.

 

 

An Evening with A. J. Jacobs

Thursday, September 30, 2010
P. E. Monroe Auditorium, 7:00pm

(Book signing following in lobby.) 

A.J. Jacobs' best-selling book, The Year of Living Biblically, is the 2010 Summer Read for LRU First Year students. Jacobs is the editor at large at Esquire magazine and author of two New York Times bestsellers. In 2004, Simon & Schuster published The Know-It-All. In 2007, The Year of Living Biblically was released. In September of 2009, his new book, The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment, was published by Simon & Schuster. The book contains some previously published experiments (including "My Outsourced Life," Jacobs' quest to delegate every task in his life to India). But more than half is new, including life-changing quests featuring George Washington's rules of life, marital harmony, marital disharmony, multitasking, and nudity (not in that order). He has appeared on Oprah, The Today Show, Good Morning America and Late Night with Conan O'Brien. He is a periodic commentator on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday. The Year of Living Biblically is currently being developed by Paramount Pictures, and "My Outsourced Life" is being developed at Universal Pictures. He is now working on a book called The Healthiest Human Being in the World. It continues Jacobs' experiential journalism series as he tries to perfect his physical condition while simultaneously dissecting the meaning of the word "healthiest."

 

 

An Evening with Luis Alberto Urrea

Thursday, October 7, 2010
Belk Centrum, 7:00pm

Luis Alberto Urrea, 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, is a prolific and acclaimed writer who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss, and triumph. Born in Tijuana, Mexico, Urrea has published extensively in all the major genres. The critically acclaimed and best-selling author of thirteen books, Urrea has won numerous awards for his poetry, fiction, and essays. The Devil's Highway, his 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. An historical novel, The Hummingbird's Daughter, tells the story of Teresa Urrea, sometimes known as the Saint of Cabora and the Mexican Joan of Arc. The book, which involved twenty years of research and writing, won the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and, along with The Devil's Highway, was named a best book of the year by many publications. Urrea's most recent novel, Into the Beautiful North, imagines a small town in Mexico where all the men have immigrated to the U.S. It earned a citation of excellence from the American Library Association Rainbow's Project. A short story from Urrea's collection Six Kinds of Sky was recently released as a stunning graphic novel by Cinco Puntos Press. Urrea has also won an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America for best short story (2009, "Amapola" in Phoenix Noir). His first book, Across the Wire, was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the Christopher Award. 

 

 

An Evening with John Granger

Thursday, October 28, 2010
Belk Centrum, 7:00pm

(Granger's appearance is part of the LRU Harry Potterfest, October 25-30, with films, lectures, Potter Quiz Bowls, costume contests, "Wizard Rock," Friday, October 29, and a very violent "Quiddich" match, Saturday, October, 30) 

Described by TIME as the "Dean of Harry Potter Scholars," John Granger has been writing and speaking about the artistry and meaning of Joanne Rowling's Hogwarts Adventures since 2002. In all that time, he has consistently been ahead of the pack in understanding and explaining why readers love the Potter Saga. In addition to Looking for God in Harry Potter (SaltRiver, 2006) and How Harry Cast His Spell (Tyndale, 2008), the third edition and final update of his first book The Hidden Key to Harry Potter, Granger is the author of Unlocking Harry Potter: Seven Keys for the Serious Reader (Zossima 2007), The Deathly Hallows Lectures: The Hogwarts Professor Explains the Final Harry Potter Adventure (Zossima, 2008), and Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books Behind the Hogwarts Adventures (Penguin, 2009). He is currently writing Spotlight: A Close-Up Look at the Artistry and Meaning of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga.

 

 

An Evening with W. S. Merwin

Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Belk Centrum, 7:00pm

Pulitzer prize-winning poet, William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City on September 30, 1927. Merwin attended Princeton University on a scholarship, where he was a classmate of Galway Kinnell, and studied poetry with the critic R. P. Blackmur, and his teaching assistant, John Berryman. After graduating in 1948, he spent an additional year at Princeton studying Romance language. Merwin's first collection, A Mask for Janus (1952), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Green with Beasts (1956) and The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), both demonstrate the beginning of a significant shift in style and perspective, which intensified in his later work. In 1967, Merwin published the critically acclaimed volume, The Lice, followed by The Carrier of Ladders in 1970, both of which remain his most influential collections. Both books use classical legends as a means to explore personal and political themes, including his opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1971, Merwin received the Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders. The rigorous practice of Buddhism and passionate dedication to environmentalism that Merwin devoted himself to in Hawaii has profoundly influenced his later work, including his evocative renderings of the natural world in The Compass Flower (1977), Opening the Hand (1983), and The Rain in the Trees (1988), as well as The Folding Cliffs, a novel-in-verse drawing on the history and legends of Hawaii. Over the course of his long career, Merwin has published over twenty books of poetry. His recent collections include Present Company (Copper Canyon, 2007); Migration: New & Selected Poems (2005) which won the 2005 National Book Award; The Pupil (2002); The River Sound (1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Flower and Hand: Poems 1977-1983 (1997); The Vixen (1996); Travels (1993), which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and The Shadow of Sirius, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. He currently lives and works in Hawaii.

 

 

An Evening with Amina McIntyre
(LRU Playwright-in-Residence) 

Thursday, February 3, 2011
Belk Centrum, 7:00pm

Amina McIntyre is Lenoir-Rhyne University's first Playwright-in-Residence (spring of 2011). McIntyre is a playwright and works as an editor for the Infinite Field Magazine. In addition to productions of her short plays, Point of View and In Those Jeans, she has had a staged reading of her one-act Two Card Table and a Clothes Rack and a cold reading of her play Doin' The Work at the Indiana Theater Association ITWorks 2008, as well as poems in various publications. Her full-length play, Most Eligible Bachelor, was produced at Wabash College in April 2009. A native of Atlanta, GA, McIntyre received a BA in Anthropology at Colby College, a MA in African American and African Diaspora Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University.

 

 

An Evening with Kevin Young

Thursday, February 24, 2011
Belk Centrum, 7:00pm

(Young will be joined on stage by nationally recognized jazz and experimental musicians.) 

Kevin Young is the author of six books of poetry, including Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008), winner of the Southern Independent Bookseller's Award in poetry, and Jelly Roll: A Blues (Knopf, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. Young's anthology The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing appeared in March 2010 from Bloomsbury. Recently named the United States Artists James Baldwin Fellow, Young is Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.

 

 

 

An Evening with David Baldacci

Thursday, March 31, 2011
P. E. Monroe Auditorium, 7:00pm

(Booksigning 4:30-5:30 at the Patrick Beaver Memorial Library.) 

David Baldacci was born in Virginia, in 1960, where he currently resides. He received a Bachelor of Arts in political science from Virginia Commonwealth University and a law degree from the University of Virginia. Baldacci practiced law for nine years in Washington, DC, as both a trial and corporate attorney. David Baldacci has published nineteen adult novels: Absolute Power, Total Control, The Winner, The Simple Truth, Saving Faith, Wish You Well, Last Man Standing, The Christmas Train, Split Second, Hour Game, The Camel Club, The Collectors, Simple Genius, Stone Cold, The Whole Truth, Divine Justice, First Family, True Blue, and Deliver Us From Evil. He has also published two young adult novels: Freddy and the French Fries: Fries Alive! and Freddy and the French Fries: The Adventures of Silas Finklebean. He published a novella for the Dutch entitled Office Hours, written for Holland's Year 2000 "Month of the Thriller" and authored a short story, "The Mighty Johns," as part of a mystery anthology published in 2002. His works have been in numerous worldwide magazines, newspapers, journals, and publications. Baldacci has authored seven original screenplays. His books have been translated into more than forty-five languages and sold in more than eighty countries. All of his books have been national and international bestsellers.

 

 

An Afternoon with Deborah Wiles 
(The Little Read)

Saturday, April 9, 2011
P. E. Monroe Auditorium, Noon.

(Booksigning followed by a luau on the lawn.) 

Deborah Wiles is the 2011 Little Read author. While reading to her children, Wiles fell in love with children's books. She sold her first picture book, Freedom Summer (Simon & Schuster/Atheneum 2001), in 1998, followed that same year by her first novel, Love, Ruby Lavender (Harcourt 2001). Wiles' work has received the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award, the PEN/Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Working Writer Fellowship, and a Golden Kite Honor from SCBWI. Her novel Each Little Bird That Sings was awarded the E.B. White Read Aloud Award and was a 2005 National Book Award finalist. Wiles lives in Atlanta, GA. In 2010, she will publish the first novel in a young-readers trilogy about the 1960s.