Kingsolver appearance moved to Oct. 2
Author Barbara Kingsolver will visit Boone for an Oct. 2 talk at the Broyhill Events Center.
Appalachian State University’s Belk Library and Algonquin Books
present an evening with best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver in conversation with two winners of
the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.
This event will take place on Tuesday,
Oct. 2, at 7 p.m. at the Broyhill Events Center (formerly the Broyhill Inn and Conference Center) on
the ASU campus. The event was originally scheduled for Oct. 4 but was moved because of scheduling
conflicts.
The event will be moderated by Joseph Bathanti, an ASU English professor who was
recently named North Carolina’s poet laureate.
The Bellwether Prize, which was established
in 2000 and is maintained through an endowment by Kingsolver, promotes fiction that addresses issues
of social justice and the impact of culture and politics on human relationships. The award is now
administered by PEN American Center.
The Bellwether Prize recipients include Donna M.
Gershten’s “Kissing the Virgin’s Mouth” in 2000; Gayle Brandeis’s “The Book of Dead Birds” in 2002;
Marjorie Kowalski Cole’s “Correcting the Landscape” in 2004; Hillary Jordan’s “Mudbound” in 2006;
Heidi W. Durrow’s “The Girl Who Fell from the Sky” in 2008; and Naomi Benaron’s “Running the Rift”
in 2010.
The newest winner, Susan Nussbaum’s “Good King, Bad King,” will be published in
2013 by Algonquin Books.
This event will include Bellwether Prize winners Hillary Jordan and
Naomi Benaron in conversation with Kingsolver, alongside the Bellwether Prize editor from Algonquin
Books, Kathy Pories.
Kingsolver praised “Running the Rift” as “truly fearless writing:
ambitious, beautiful, unapologetically passionate. Culturally rich and completely engrossing.”
And she hailed “Mudbound” as “storytelling at the height of its powers: the ache of wrongs
not yet made right, the fierce attendance of history made as real as rain, as true as this minute.
Hillary Jordan writes with the force of a Delta storm.”
For more information about the
event, call Patty Wheeler at (828) 262-2800.
