Visiting Writers Series

Colson Whitehead
Thursday, September 14, 2017
7 pm - 8 pm
PE Monroe Auditorium

Colson Whitehead was raised in Manhattan and attended Harvard University. After graduation he began working for Village Voice as a reviewer of books, movies, and music. His first novel, The Intuitionist, was the winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award. Whitehead is the author of Lenoir-Rhyne’s 2017-2018 Campus Read, The Underground Railroad, which was a New York Times bestseller and Time Magazine’s Book of the Year for 2016. The novel follows Cora, an escaped slave fleeing for the north with the assistance of the Underground Railroad—only in this novel, the Railroad isn’t just a system of people helping escaped slaves, but a network of hidden tracks and tunnels. CBS called the novel “Ingenious” and USA Today said it is “one of the finest novels written about our country’s still unabsolved original sin.”

Whitehead is the author of several other novels, including John Henry Days, which was the winner of the 2002 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Young Lions Fiction Award, and Sag Harbor, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also written a collection of essays about New York City entitled The Colossus of New York, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Whitehead has written for many publications, including The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and Harper’s. In his 2012 piece entitled “How to Write”, he advises writers, “Don’t go searching for a subject, let your subject find you. You can’t rush inspiration.” He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Dos Passos Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, and has taught at many universities across the United States, including New York University, Princeton University, and Wesleyan University. He currently lives in New York City.

Amor Towles
Thursday, September 28, 2017
7 pm - 8 pm
PE Monroe Auditorium
Sponsored by the Hickory Public Library - including book signing at the HPL at 4:30 pm - 5:45 pm.

Amor Towles is a Boston native currently living in Manhattan with his family. He attended Yale College and was a Scowcroft Fellow at Stanford University, where he received his M.A. in English. In 1989, Towles published a short story cycle called “The Temptations of Pleasure” in Paris Review 112. Previously an investment professional, his 2011 debut novel, Rules of Civility, was a New York Times, LA Times, and Boston Globe Bestseller. NPR said of Towles’ style, “Towles writes with grace and verve about the mores and manners of a society on the cusp of radical change.” The book was published in 15 languages and its French translation received the 2012 Prix Fitzgerald; the novel was also optioned in 2012 to be made into a film by Lionsgate.

His most recent book, A Gentleman in Moscow, was chosen by NPR, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune as a best book of the year for 2016. Ron Charles of The Washington Post called the novel “an endearing reminder of the graciousness of real class.” The book tells the story of Count Alexander Rostov, an aristocrat sentenced to spend the remainder of his life inside a hotel across from the Kremlin as the result of a Bolshevik tribunal. Rostov watches from his window as some of the most tumultuous years of Russian history unfold, and through his experience he discovers what it truly means to have purpose. Towles said he was inspired to write the book after he returned to a hotel in Geneva and saw some of the same people he had in previous years; he imagined a story about a man who was forced to stay in a hotel and his “mind immediately leapt to Russia—where house arrest has existed since the time of the Tsars.” He is currently working on his next novel.

Iggy McGovern
Thursday, October 12, 2017
7 pm - 8 pm
Belk Centrum

Iggy McGovern is the author of three collections of poetry, The King of Suburbia (2005), Safe House (2010), and A Mystic Dream of 4 (2013). A review in Poetry Ireland Trumpet said of A Mystic Dream of 4 “[It] succeeds very well both as poetry and as a story of [William Rowan] Hamilton’s life. The sonnets are accomplished and the book has an impressive unity.” McGovern co-edited Science Meets Poetry 3 and edited the anthology 2012: Twenty Irish Poets Respond to Science in Twelve Lines. He holds degrees in physics from Queen’s University in Belfast and was a Professor of Physics at Trinity College Dublin until he retired in 2013; he has since been named a Fellow Emeritus in the School of Physics at Trinity. He began writing when he took a night class creative writing “to become more interesting”, and has attended several other workshops since.

McGovern has received many awards, including the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award for Poetry and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary. McGovern has read widely on the international stage, appearing in cities such as Beijing, Philadelphia, Prague, and Berlin. He has given lectures on the common ground between Literature and Science, served as a judge (alongside Michael Schmidt) for the 2012 Strokestown International Poetry Prize, and was a 2006 Distinguished Fellow (Poetry and Physics) at La Trobe University. In 2015 he was appointed the Alexander von Humboldt Visiting Researcher at ELINAS, Friedrich-Alexander Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg. When asked what advice he would give for writers just starting out, he said, “Remember that the fun is in the writing. Once you have a poem, you’ve had your fun already. Anything else is extra, a bonus, the sending out and all that.”

Erik Larson
Thursday, October 26, 2017
7 pm - 8 pm
PE Monroe Auditorium

Sponsored by the Hickory Public Library (HPL). There will be a book signing at the HPL from 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm.

A native of New York City, Erik Larson is the author of seven novels, five of which are New York Times bestsellers. His most recent novel, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, hit #1 on the list. His previous book, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, also hit #1 on the Times list and has had movie rights optioned by Universal Studios and Tom Hanks’ Playton. The Devil in the White City spent a combined total of over six years on the New York Times bestseller list, won an Edgar Award for nonfiction crime writing and was a finalist for a National Book Award. Leonardo DiCaprio has acquired the option to make a movie of the book; Martin Scorsese will direct, Billy Ray will write the screenplay, and the studio will be backed by Paramount.

Larson has written for The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and Harper’s, among other magazines, and was nominated for a Pulitzer for investigative journalism at The Wall Street Journal. He received his undergraduate degree in Russian History, Language and Culture from the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated summa cum laude, and his Masters in Journalism from Columbia University. He has taught nonfiction writing at the University of Oregon and San Francisco State, as well as the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. He lists Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett as influences, and his writing routine, which includes getting up at 4:30 a.m. to work on writing one page a day, was partially inspired by novelist Graham Greene. When describing his primary goal as a writer, he said, “My primary goal is to produce as rich a historical experience as I possibly can. So readers can sink into the past and feel like they’ve spent some time there. That they’ve lived another life, however briefly.”

Angela Davis-Gardner, Patrice Gopo, & Allison Hutchcraft
Thursday, November 16, 2017
7 pm - 8 pm
Belk Centrum

Angela Davis-Gardner received her BA in English from Duke University, and her MFA from UNC Greensboro. Her first teaching job was in Tokyo at Tsuda College, and upon returning from Japan, she worked as a journalist before teaching at Guilford College, UNC Greensboro, and NC State University, where she spent the majority of her career before retiring and being named a Distinguished Professor Emerita. Her first novel, Felice, was published in 1982, and she has written several essays, stories, and books since, including the books Butterfly’s Child and Plum Wine, both of which were influenced by her interest in Japanese-American relations and Japanese culture. Felice was adapted into an opera and was recently staged at Opera Breve. Another major theme of Gardner’s work is the complexity of family relationships, as shown by the praise the LA Times gave for her novel, Forms of Shelter, “Rarely has an author confronted more honestly one of the deepest betrayals of the notion of family….A deeply moving piece of literature.”

Davis-Gardner has won many awards, including two grants from the North Carolina Arts Council and two Fellowships from the Japan Foundation. In 2007 she was Duke University’s William Blackburn Visiting Fiction Writer, and she has spent several residencies at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Plum Wine was named a Notable Novel by the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize and was the winner of the Fiction Award from the Southern Independent Bookstore Alliance. Her essays and shorter works have appeared in magazines such as Shenandoah and The Greensboro Review. Her story, “Writing It Down,” was recently featured as Narrative Magazine’s Story of the Week. In addition to her writing, she continues to teach private classes and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.


Movement across state and country borders is part of our reality, observes Charlotte writer Patrice Gopo. “We live in a time when many in society seek to confront issues of racial injustice and acknowledge the presence of global hierarchies,” she says. “Writing personal essays becomes a way for me to engage in these discussions and consider the way movement, migration, and injustice impact identity formation.” She is a 2017-18 N.C. Arts Council fellowship recipient.

A black Jamaican American who grew up in a predominantly white environment, Gopo gathers reflections and images from her life, and looks for intersection points of the personal with the larger culture in which she exists. “In this way, my work expands the intimate to the universal, but also shrinks the universal to the intimate,” she says.

Gopo holds an MBA from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, and an MPP from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. She developed her writing skills while taking a variety of writing courses and attending the Wildacres Writing Workshop, Creative Nonfiction Writers’ Conference and the Image Journal’s Glen Workshop.

She is the recipient of the Gell Residency for Writers with Young Children (2017), was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for the essay, "What Remains," (2016), and received a 2016 Regional Artist Project Grant from the Arts and Science Council for the City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. Her essays have appeared in a number of publications, including online in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Gopo’s essay, For My Husband Driving Down a Mountain, was read on WFAE-FM in 2016.

“Writing personal essays allows me to explore the ways people continually create lives in the gaps between ties to multiple places,” Gopo says. “My forthcoming essay collection examines the formation of identity through a variety of lenses, including experiences related to race and immigration as well as broader issues of belonging. I see my essay collection as both a doorway into understanding a different experience and a mirror that reminds readers of our shared humanity.”


“My work looks outward to the natural world, particularly to animals and the expansive spaces of meadows and oceans, as well as inward to the landscape of the mind,” says Charlotte poet Allison Hutchcraft. “Anchoring my poems is a desire to see beyond surfaces—to encounter the thing itself, as well as its creative possibilities.” She is a 2017-18 N.C. Arts Council fellowship recipient.

Hutchcraft says she is drawn towards meditative lyrics and sequential poems, which push her to explore questions from an array of angles. “Research in all its many forms—following hunches, reading widely, immersing in a subject—offers gifts of discovery, complication, and fertile ambiguities that feed my writing and imaginative thinking,” she says. “Reading has opened so many worlds to me—from those of extinct birds and the ethics of looking at animals to colonial and ecological histories. My work springs from such exploration and a practice of gathering images, shaping bits of language, and imagining.”

Hutchcraft’s poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, The Cincinnati Review, Barrow Street, the Beloit Poetry Journal, American Letters & Commentary, West Branch, and other journals. She has been awarded scholarships from the Tin House Writers Workshop, Key West Literary Seminar, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and received a 2016 Regional Artist Project Grant from the Arts & Science Council for the City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. She was a fellow at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences in 2017, and will be a resident at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast in 2018. She earned an M.F.A.in Creative Writing (Poetry), from Purdue University.

Jennifer Horne
Thursday, January 18, 2018
7 pm - 8 pm
Belk Centrum

Jennifer Horne is a blogger, poet, teacher, journalist, and editor currently living in Alabama. She is the 2017-2018 Visiting Writer in Residence and will teach at Lenoir-Rhyne during the spring semester. Horne is the author of two collections of poetry, Little Wanderer (2016) and Bottle Tree (2010), two poetry chapbooks, Miss Betty’s School of Dance and Tineretuluias, as well as a collection of short stories, Tell the World You’re a Wildflower. Her short story “The Other Shoe” was published in The Shoe Burnin’: Stories of Southern Soul and her article, “Sara Mayfield: A Woman of Her Times” was published by the Alabama Heritage Magazine in the spring of 2016. She co-edited All Out of Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality, Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality, and Belles’ Letters II (due out in 2017) and edited Working the Dirt: An Anthology of Southern Poets.

Horne received her BA in Humanities from Hendrix College. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing, MA in English, and MA in Community Counseling from the University of Alabama, where she currently teaches. She was the recipient of the 2015 Druid City Literary Arts Award and has been a finalist for several poetry contests, including the 2014 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York and the 2012 Arkansas Arts Center Ekphrastic Poetry Contest. She is widely traveled, having lived in places such as Bucharest, Romania and Oxford, England, and has received fellowships from the Seaside Institute in Florida and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. In 2013 she gave the opening address for the International Fitzgerald Society meeting and in 2015 gave the Rhoda Coleman Ellison Lecture at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, AL. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and a memoir-influenced book about Sara Mayfield, biographer of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Marie Heaney & Catherine Heaney
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
7 pm - 8 pm
Belk Centrum

Marie Heaney first visited Lenoir-Rhyne in 1996, not long after publishing her highly-acclaimed Over Nine Waves: A Book of Irish Legends. Since that time she has also written an illustrated children’s book on the same topic, The Names upon the Harp. She says about the stories in The Names upon the Harp: “What ensures their place in world literature is their timelessness, their value as expressions of the perennial art of the storyteller.' Marie Heaney has also edited several anthologies, including Heart’s Mysteries: 50 Poems from Ireland to Touch the Soul (2003) and A Sunday Miscellany 1994-2000 (2009). Her most recent anthology, All Through the Night: Night Poems & Lullabies, was published in 2016.

Marie Heaney was born in County Tyrone, Ireland. She trained as a teacher in Northern Ireland and received a Master's degree in Irish Studies at University College, Dublin. In 1965 she married Seamus Heaney who would go on to international acclaim, including being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. The Heaney’s moved from Belfast to Glanmore Cottage in County Wicklow in 1972 and from there to Dublin in 1976. Seamus Heaney died unexpectedly of a heart problem at the age of 74 in 2013. All Through the Night is a response in part to the fact that Braham’s “Lullaby” was one of Seamus Heaney’s favorite tunes, a melody that was played at the poet’s funeral. Marie Heaney will read selections from All Through the Night with commentary. She currently lives in Dublin where she enjoys seeing her three grandchildren, Anna Rose, Aibhín and Síofra, to whom the book is dedicated.


Catherine Heaney was born and grew up in Dublin, and received her BA and MSc from Trinity College Dublin. She worked as a journalist for many years at magazines in Dublin and London and was a regular book reviewer for The Irish Times. Since the early 2000s, she has worked in publishing, as an editor at Fourth Estate and more recently at Faber and Faber, where she ran the creative-writing school Faber Academy. She works as a freelance writer and editor, and most recently edited a volume of essays, Trinity Tales, published by The Lilliput Press in 2016. She is a director of the Seamus Heaney Estate, and works with publishers and various institutions around the world to preserve and promote her father's work and legacy. She lives in London.

Zadie Smith and Nick Laird
Thursday, March 22, 2018
7 pm - 8 pm
PE Monroe Auditorium
Tickets are recommended in advance for this event.

London-born author Zadie Smith is the author of seven novels, her most recent being Swing Time, which was a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. In a review of the novel, The New York Times wrote, “Smith has a knack for unearthing the deeper truths that lie beneath common experience.” Her novel, On Beauty, was the winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Another novel, NW, was one of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2012. An excerpt from NW, “The Embassy of Cambodia”, was awarded a 2014 ASME National Magazine award for fiction. In 2002 she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Smith has also edited the anthology Piece of Flesh and contributed writing to The New Yorker.

Nick Laird is a former lawyer turned full-time author who currently teaches at Columbia University. He has received many awards, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Award, and the Betty Trask Prize. Laird is the author of five books and poetry collections, including To a Fault, which won the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. The Daily Telegraph praises his most recent collection of poems, Go Giants, calling it, “Both playful and powerful” and The Times says, “Here are some of Laird’s most successful and mature poems.” Though he has written successful novels, Laird said about writing, “I have always written fiction and I think I'm not bad at it, and while there is no hierarchy between oranges and apples, poetry is my first love and remains special to me as a unique art form that can do things like nothing else."

Robert Beatty
Saturday, April 14, 2018
12 pm - 1 pm
PE Monroe Auditorium

Robert Beatty is the author of the 2017-2018 Little Read book, Serafina and the Black Cloak, which was a New York Times, Barnes and Noble, USA Today, and Publisher’s Weekly best seller. The mystery-thriller tells the story of a young girl secretly living with her father in the basement of the Biltmore Estate; she teams up with the nephew of the Biltmore Estate’s owners to discover why children around the property have suddenly begun disappearing. The sequel to Serafina and the Black Cloak, Serafina and the Twisted Staff, was released in July 2016 and received a "Starred Review" from Kirkus Reviews. The third book in the series, Serafina and the Splintered Heart, was released in the summer of 2017, and he says for this book he was partly inspired by old folk songs from the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Serafina Series has been taught in thousands of classrooms across the US and was the Winner of the 2016 Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize. The character Serafina was inspired by his middle daughter, and the setting by his close location to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Biltmore Estate.

Beatty was the founder, CEO, and chief architect of Plex Systems and is a patented inventor who was named an Entrepreneur of the Year in 2007. Beatty has served numerous roles with Narrative Magazine, including Chairman of the Board. He publishes a robotics tech blog, beatty-robotics.com, with his daughters, and Beatty Robotics has evolved into a company that builds robots for science centers and museums. President Obama invited the Beattys to the White House in 2014, holding them up as an example of the American entrepreneurial spirit. Beatty and his family are all licensed wildlife rehabilitators, and they currently live in the mountains of Asheville, NC.

Thursday, April 19, 2018
7 pm - 8 pm
Belk Centrum

Many of Gifford’s works are characterized by a focus on the connection of literature and the environment. His critical works include Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry, Reconnecting with John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice, and Teaching A Level English Literature: A Student Centred Approach. He has written or co-written eight books of poetry, including Ten Letters To John Muir and The Unreliable Mushrooms: New and Selected Poems, and his editorial work includes the books The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes and Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism (co-edited with Fiona Becket). He has given research seminars at Shanghai Normal University, Trinity College Dublin, Massey University, amongst others. He has also been invited as a lecturer to many universities, including Brigham Young University, Western Carolina University, California State University, and Lenoir-Rhyne University (then Lenoir-Rhyne College). Gifford’s latest works, Pastoral and A Feast of Fools (poetry), are due out in 2018.