Hub City Reader: Mark Powell, Literary Luncheons, an Interview with Casey Patrick & More

Mark Powell, Kim Boykin & Erica Marks, Casey Patrick & More

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"At once haunting and an act of pure grace . . . The Sheltering is a book of the spirit and a deeply spiritual book. It is a hallucinatory work of visions for our visionless world, and I think a work of magical realism. I would not want to visit Mark Powell's eerie illusion of Florida or New Orleans or the American West, but I'm grateful he brought me along with him for this illuminating ride through the darkness."â€”Pat Conroy from the foreword

This Week: Mark Powell reads from The Sheltering
August 14, 7-8 pm
Hub City Bookshop

Please join us for a reading of The Sheltering by Mark Powell, a native of Mountain Rest, S.C., now teaching at Stetson University in Florida.

Luther Redding lost his job, and almost lost his wife, Pamela, and teenaged daughters Katie and Lucy, when the real estate bubble burst in Florida. Now he pilots a Reaper drone over the mountains of Afghanistan from a command center in the bowels of Tampa's MacDill Air Force Base, studying a target's pattern of life and awaiting the command to end that life. Overarching questions of faith and redemption clash with the rough-hewn realities of terror and loss, all to explosive ends in Powell's dark vision of modern Americana.

Mark Powell is the author of three previous novels, Prodigals (nominated for the Cabell First Novelist Award), Blood Kin (winner of the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel), and The Dark Corner. Powell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Breadloaf Writers' Conference. In 2009 he received the Chaffin Award for contributions to Appalachian literature. Powell holds degrees from Yale Divinity School, the University of South Carolina, and the Citadel. He is an associate professor of English at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida.

Find more info about this event here. We hope to see you there!

-Betsy, Meg & Anne

Kim Boykin & Erica Marks
August 26, 5pm
Hub City Bookshop

Please join us as two authors will read from and sign their newest novels, both set in Lowcountry South Carolina.

Kim Boykin of Charlotte will read from Palmetto Moon, the follow up to her first novel, The Wisdom of Hair.

A native New Englander who was raised in Maine, Erika Marks has worked as an illustrator, an art director, a cake decorator, and a carpenter. She is the author of The Guest House, The Mermaid Collector and Little Gale Gumbo.

Learn more about their books here.

Rick Mulkey
August 28, 7pm
Hub City Bookshop

Poet Rick Mulkey, director of the Converse College Creative Writing MFA program, along with his literary friends, will read from his newest collection of poems. In addition to Rick, readers include: Angela Kelly, Tom Johnson, Claire Bateman, Scott Robbins and Susan Tekulve.

Ravenous: New & Selected Poems provides new and returning readers an opportunity to consider recent and previously published work in a collection containing wide stylistic variety with deep unifying themes and concerns. From an 18th Century Persian village to the porches and homesteadâ€™s of the Appalachian South, these poems counterpoint the sorrowful with the joyful, exploring how â€œeven in the soulâ€™s grim mines, one tuned string/perfectly plucked could make us believe all would be right.â€

More details here.

Hub City Announces New Writer-In-Residence
Casey Patrick, who will join Hub City as writer-in-residence in mid-September, grew up outside of Philadelphia and has lived in western Illinois, the Inland Northwest, and Minneapolis, where she currently resides. For the last year, she has worked as the publishing assistant at Milkweed Editions. Her poems and interviews have recently appeared in Willow Springs and Fourteen Hills, and her work is forthcoming in Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing.

Read More about Casey here, and be sure to check out this short interview with her on out website!