2009 Authors

Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues

Category: Music/Non-fiction
Festival Year: 2009

William Ferris, a widely recognized leader in Southern studies, African American music and folklore, is a History professor at UNC Chapel Hill and the senior associate director of its Center for the Study of the American South.

The former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ferris has conducted thousands of interviews with musicians ranging from the famous (B.B. King) to the unrecognized (Parchman Penitentiary inmates working in the fields). He has produced numerous sound recordings and hosted "Highway 61," a weekly blues program on Mississippi Public Radio for nearly a decade. He has written or edited 10 books including his newest, Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues.

Songs for the Missing

Category: Fiction
Festival Year: 2009

Stewart O’Nan was working as a test engineer when his wife Trudy encouraged him to pursue a career in writing. In 1992, O’Nan graduated with his M.F.A. from Cornell University. Since then, he has taught at the University of Central Oklahoma and the University of New Mexico; has been a writer-in-residence and taught creative writing at Trinity College; and the research he did for his novel The Names of the Dead led to the creation of a class that studied Vietnam War memoirs as a form of literature, which he also initially taught.   

In 1996, Granta named him one of America's Best Young Novelists, and the New York Times Book Review has deemed his writing full of “quiet grace.”

A Box Full of Kittens

Category: Children’s
Festival Year: 2009

Sonia Manzano is best known as “Maria” on Sesame Street, the first Latino character on the show. Manzano has earned fifteen Emmy Awards as a member of the Sesame Street writing staff and has been honored by the Association of Hispanic Arts and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in Washington, D.C., has received an honorary doctorate from Notre Dame University, and has been inducted into the Bronx Hall of Fame. She has written two children’s books: No Dogs Allowed and A Box Full of Kittens. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet

Category: Children’s
Festival Year: 2009

Reif Larsen, 28, is a filmmaker, teacher, and writer. While studying Educational Studies at Brown University, Larsen spent time teaching at Maru-a-Pula school in Gaborone, Botswana. This spring, he organized a U.S. tour of the Maru-a-Pula school marimba band in order to raise funds for AIDS orphan scholarships.

Larsen’s debut novel, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, has been hailed as a boundary-leaping work tracing twelve-year-old genius T.S.Spivet’s attempts to understand the ways of the world. Larsen lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Columbia University, where he received his MFA in fiction.

"Breaking Into Children’s Publishing" 

Category: Workshop
Festival Year: 2009

Megan Bryant is no stranger to getting children’s books published. Her canon of published work includes the Strawberry Shortcake series and several books as part of the “All Aboard Reading” series published by Grosset & Dunlap. Her newest book, The Easter Bunny’s Workshop, is full of bright illustrations and moveable parts that encourage young readers to interact with the story. Megan’s forthcoming title, The Royal Christmas Ballet, will be available at the end of September from Perseus Book Group. 

31 Hours by Masha Hamilton

Category: Fiction
Festival Year: 2009

Masha Hamilton is a Brown University graduate who has worked as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press in the Middle East, as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in Moscow, and in 2006, traveled to Kenya to research her novel The Camel Bookmobile.

Hamilton is the author of four novels, all of which have been highly praised by Library Journal, Booklist, Booksense, and the New York Times. Hamilton has been awarded fiction fellowships from Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She teaches for Gotham Writers' Workshop and currently lives with her family in Brooklyn.

The Legal Limit

Category: Fiction/Thriller
Festival Year: 2009

The New York Times has declared Martin Clark to be "the thinking man's John Grisham." He is a circuit court judge in Virginia and the author of three novels, the first of which, The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Stephen Crane First Fiction Award.

Clark’s second novel, Plain Heathen Mischief, also received starred reviews and was nominated for several literary awards in 2004. His newest release, The Legal Limit, was selected by NPR as one of its "Summer Reads" and was featured and excerpted in Readers Digest. The New York Times Book Review has called it "a novel of ample graces.”

The Japanification of Children's Popular Culture: From Godzilla to Miyazaki 

Category: Workshop: Graphic Novels, Webcomics and Manga
Festival Year: 2009

Mark I. West is a Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he teaches courses in children's and young adult literature. He has published numerous books and articles, most of which relate to children’s literature and culture.  His books include The Japanification of Children's Popular Culture: From Godzilla to Miyazaki; Psychoanalytic Responses to Children's Literature; Wellsprings of Imagination: Voices Against Censorship in Children's Literature; and Before Oz: Juvenile Fantasy Stories from Nineteenth-Century America. Before becoming a professor, West performed as a professional puppeteer.

A Troubled Peace

Category: Young Adult
Festival Year: 2009

Laura Malone Elliott is a graduate of Wake Forest University and author of four YA novels. Her newest, A Troubled Peace, is the sequel to Under a War-torn Sky, and tells the story of a B-24 pilot, Henry Forester, who returns to France to find the Resistance boy who saved his life.
 
Elliott has also authored four picture books with New York Times best-selling illustrator, Lynn Munsinger. A long-time writer for the Washingtonian magazine, Elliott was twice a finalist for a National Magazine Award. She also holds a masters degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina, and currently lives in Virginia with her husband and two children.

Christmas Maus: Another Small Tale of Sisters House in Salem

Category: Children’s
Festival Year: 2009

As Associate Professor at Salem College, John Hutton teaches a wide range of art history and survey courses from the Paleolithic to Baroque periods, as well as Women in Art. Hutton received his degrees from Princeton University; the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London; and Harvard. He has chaired the Art Department and the First Year portion of the Salem Signature Program and lectures extensively, most frequently at the Reynolda House Museum of American Art.

An artist as well as scholar, Hutton is a painter, draughtsman, designer of stationery, and illustrator of children’s books. He has published ten books, including: Sister Maus and, most recently, Christmas Maus.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Category: Non-fiction/History
Festival Year: 2009

John Berendt's first book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, spent a record-breaking four years on the New York Times bestseller list and, to date, has sold five million copies worldwide. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for general nonfiction, it was made into a movie directed by Clint Eastwood in 1997.

With his most recent book, The City of Falling Angels, Berendt once again claimed the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list. In this new non-fiction work, Berendt offers a penetrating and intriguing look at the private lives behind the storied façades of Venice.

“What’s in a Name?”

Category: Workshop
Festival Year: 2009

What would have happened if F. Scott Fitzgerald’s publisher approved the suggested title “Under the Red, White and Blue”? Simply put, The Great Gatsby might not have had the same success. Titles are not simply ways to catalogue works. In this workshop, we’ll consider the importance of a variety of titles and explore ways to develop effective titles for our own work.

Joe Mills is a visiting writer at Salem College and a permanent faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He has written two books of poetry, Somewhere During the Spin Cycle and Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers. His third collection, Love and Other Collisions, will be released in 2010.

The Cracker Kitchen: A Cookbook in Celebration of Cornbread-Fed, Down Home Family Stories and Cuisine

Category: Cookbook
Festival Year: 2009

Janis Owens is a novelist, memoirist, and folklorist. She is a native of West Florida and received her degree from the University of Florida, where she was a Creative Writing student of Harry Crews for two years. She has been a working writer ever since and is the award-winning author of three acclaimed novels.

Her new book The Cracker Kitchen is part-cookbook and part-family memoir that celebrates the backwoods resilience of a much maligned section of Southern culture: the hapless, toothless Cracker. Janis traces the roots of the word back to its origins and explores this group of proud, fiercely independent Americans who have a deep love of their families, country, stories and food.

A Son of the Game

Category: Non-fiction/Sports/Memoir
Festival Year: 2009

James Dodson currently resides in Southern Pines, North Carolina, where he is Writer-in-Residence at The Pilot Newspaper and editor of PineStraw Magazine. For almost twenty years, he was an award-winning regular columnist for Golf Magazine. He is the author of five books and his work has also appeared in GQ, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Travel and Leisure, Town and Country, Reader's Digest, and numerous other publications.

Dodson's current book, A Son of the Game, published in May 2009, is set in Southern Pines and has been called his best memoir.

The Big Steal

Category: Fiction/Mystery
Festival Year: 2009

Emyl Jenkins is a longtime antiques appraiser who has worked at two auction houses and written numerous books and articles on antiques, as well as a syndicated column. She is the author of Emyl Jenkins’ Appraisal Book, Emyl Jenkins’ Southern Christmas, The Book of American Traditions, From Storebought to Homemade, and most recently, the Sterling Glass Mysteries series published by Algonquin. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Parlous Angels

Category: Fiction/Short Stories
Festival Year: 2009

Ed Southern, a Winston-Salem native, is the Executive Director of the North Carolina Writers' Network. His previous non-fiction titles include: Spots in the Carolinas: From Death Valley to Tobacco Road, Voices of the American Revolution in the Carolinas, and The Jamestown Adventure. Parlous Angels is his first work of fiction.

Back to Wando Passo

Category: Fiction
Festival Year: 2009

“I can think of few better ways to spend a Saturday than with authors and fellow readers gathered together to celebrate books.  BOOKMARKS demonstrates Winston-Salem’s commitment to literacy and the arts, and I am honored to be the honorary chair for the festival’s fifth year.” 

— David Payne, BOOKMARKS 2009 Honorary Chair

David Payne is the award-winning author of Back to Wando Passo and four previous novels.  A North Carolina native, David lives in Hillsborough, NC, with his family, and teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte.  David is currently at work on a memoir, Barefoot to Avalon, and will serve as writer-in-residence at Hollins University in the coming year.  

Of David's most recent novel, Pat Conroy writes: "Back to Wando Passo quivers with authentic life and is so bold in concept and audacious in scope that it seems like the summing up and exclamation point of a great writer's career. The novel contains everything..."

Mr. Payne will mingle with guests and authors at the Friday evening September 11 author reception.  During the festival, he will preside over the Welcoming Ceremony; present a session on his work; and mingle with authors and attendees throughout the day.

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

Category: Non-fiction/American History
Festival Year: 2009

Daniel Walker Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus, Oxford University, and Professor of History Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Political Culture of the American Whigs and Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Howe’s latest book, What Hath God Wrought, won the Pulitzer Prize in History for 2008. He lives in Los Angeles.

The 99-Cent Only Stores Cookbook: Gourmet Recipes at Discount Prices

Category: Cookbook
Festival Year: 2009

Christiane Jory, a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, is constantly exploring creative ways to survive for the starving artist. She first learned to cook during her time abroad in Paris. Limited funds and market hours were the catalysts which lead to learning how to cook with what was in the cupboard. This experience lent itself well to the two years of nights and weekends it took to test and write The 99 Cent Only Store Cookbook.

Jory currently resides in the Hollywood Hills and is working on two new books.

Where the River Ends

Category: Fiction
Festival Year: 2009

Charles Martin is quickly becoming a favorite among southern fiction fans. He is the author of six books and his writing has been compared to Nicholas Sparks. He earned his B.A. in English from Florida State University, and his M.A. in Journalism and Ph.D. in Communication from Regent University.

In 1999, Martin left a career in business to pursue his writing. He currently lives with his wife and three sons near the St. John's River in Jacksonville, Florida.

Becoming Billie Holiday

Category: Children’s
Festival Year: 2009

Carole Boston Weatherford is a New York Times best-selling poet and children’s author. Baltimore-born and -raised, she composed her first poem in first grade. Since her literary debut with Juneteenth Jamboree in 1995, her books have received many literary honors including: the Caldecott Honor, the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration, two NAACP Image Awards, the Ragan-Rubin Award from the North Carolina English Teachers Association, and many more.

Weatherford earned a Master of Arts in publications design from the University of Baltimore and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. She currently teaches at Fayetteville State University and lives in High Point with her husband their two children.

Midnight Sun

Category: Graphic Novels/YA
Festival Year: 2009

Ben Towle is an Eisner-nominated cartoonist known primarily for his work with SLG Publishing, including the recent historical fiction graphic novel Midnight Sun as well as his earlier volume of comics folk tales, Farewell, Georgia. His illustrations can be found in the forthcoming book, Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean, a graphic novel for young. Towle is currently hard at work on a creator-owned fantasy story about turn of the century Chesapeake Bay oystermen.