Author Appearance

Poetry Reading with Gianna Russo

Join us for a poetry reading with Gianna Russo on Saturday, July 27th at 3:00pm. She will read from her two latest books, One House Down and All I See is Your Glinting

Gianna Russo is the inaugural Wordsmith of The City of Tampa, appointed by Mayor Jane Castor in 2019-22. She wrote and performed “Glorious,” a new poem for the mayor’s second inauguration in 2023. 

Gianna is the author of the poetry collections, All I See is Your Glinting: 90 Days in the Pandemic, with photographer Jenny Carey (Madville Publishing, 2022); One House Down (Madville Publishing, 2019); and Moonflower, winner of a Florida Book Award.  She has published poems in Green Mountains Review, Gulf Stream, Negative Capability, Crab Orchard Review, Apalachee Review, The Sun, Poet Lore, saw palm, The MacGuffin, Florida Review, Tampa Review, Ekphrasis, Florida Humanities Council Forum, Karamu, The Bloomsbury Review, and Calyx, among others. 

Gianna is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she is Poet-in-Residence of the College of Arts, Sciences, and Allied Services. She is the founding editor of YellowJacket Press, which published chapbooks by over 40 Florida poets from 2006-21. A third-generation Tampa native, a mother and grandmother, Gianna lives in an almost 100-year old bungalow with her husband Jeff Karon and their cat Gingko. She and Jeff travel to their family home in Western North Carolina regularly to enjoy the glorious mountain views.

One House Down By Gianna Russo Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9781948692205
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Madville Publishing - August 9th, 2019

All I See Is Your Glinting: 90 Days in the Pandemic By Gianna Russo, Jenny Carey (Photographer) Cover Image
By Gianna Russo, Jenny Carey (Photographer)
$19.95
ISBN: 9781956440003
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Madville Publishing - January 1st, 2022

Reading with Ann Wallace

Join us at City Lights Bookstore on Sunday, April 21st at 2:00pm for a reading and conversation with Ann Wallace. She'll be reading from her latest poetry collection, Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul

Ann E. Wallace, PhD is the 2023-24 Poet Laureate of Jersey City, New Jersey. As a long-time survivor of ovarian cancer, a woman with multiple sclerosis, and one of the nation's first Long Covid patients, she has lived and written through illness for thirty years. Pain, disability, and disease—as well as hope and resilience—have inspired and informed her work as a poet, memoirist, patient advocate, and scholar. Her new poetry collection Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul (Kelsay Books, 2024) was written over three years, beginning when Wallace was first sick with severe acute COVID and following her teenage daughters’ and her long journey of recovery. Wallace’s first collection of poetry, Counting by Sevens (Main Street Rag, 2019), is a reflection on motherhood, illness, and contemporary life in America. Wallace is host and producer of The WildStory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants by the Native Plant Society of New Jersey and Professor of English at New Jersey City University. Her work is online at AnnWallacePhD.com and on Instagram @AnnWallace409.

Michael Aday, Letters from the Smokies

GSMA Photo

Great Smoky Mountain National Park librarian-archivist Michael Aday will visit City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, March 23rd at 3 p.m.  He will present his book, a collection of correspondences, Letters From the Smokies.  

Within the archives of Great Smoky Mountain National Park, a wealth of knowledge is tucked away in more than a million time-worn documents. This book makes some of the most salient of its letters readily accessible. Voices spanning three centuries, not often heard, are collected and contextualized to offer a unique perspective on the development of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.  

To reserve copies of Letters From the Smokies,  please call City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, NC, at 828-586-9499. 

 

Letters From the Smokies By Michael Aday, Denise Aday Cover Image
$16.99
ISBN: 9780937207253
Availability: We can probably get this title but the price is subject to change.
Published: Great Smoky Mountain Association - September 1st, 2023

Blood, Sweat, Tears: A Conversation with Anne Jobe

Anne Jobe visits City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, May 11th at 3:00pm for a conversation about her featured story in Blood, Sweat, Tears — a collection of short stories by women+ hikers
and runners about the experience of being in a female body on trail. Anne will also discuss how the collection came together and offer insight into the other women featured from across the country.

Anne is a trail runner and hiker who seeks peace in nature. She has backpacked over 400 miles on the Appalachian Trail. She holds an Ed.S. in K-12 Educational Leadership and served in the Huntsville (Alabama) City School District for 27 years. In addition to the outdoors, she is passionate about educating students, spending time with family, volunteering, reading, and traveling. She can be found on Instagram @Seeking_the_Sublime. 

Spencer Sunshine

Spencer Sunshine will visit City Lights on Sunday, November 24 at 1pm to talk about his new book Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege. It chronicles the creation of today’s most notorious neo-Nazi terrorist tome, Siege, which promotes Charles Manson as a neo-Nazi guru and advocates mass murder and serial killings. Sunshine’s talk will cover how a clique of 1980s and ‘90s musicians, publishers, and Satanists—including Feral House press founder Adam Parfrey—popularized Mason. Last, this wild ride will ask: how did participants in otherwise left-leaning spiritual and cultural movements, including those of the 1960s, become complicit in reactionary politics?

Spencer Sunshine (spencersunshine.com) holds a PhD in Sociology and has written about the U.S. Far Right for twenty years.

Pre-Order Now Badge
Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege (Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right) By Spencer Sunshine Cover Image
$47.78
ISBN: 9780367190606
Availability: Coming Soon: available for pre-order now
Published: Routledge - May 7th, 2024

Chris McGinley: In Conversation with David Joy

City Lights Bookstore will host authors Chris McGinley and David Joy on Saturday, March 9th, at 3 p.m. Join us for a conversation where Chris and David will discuss Appalachian literature and their respective works.

Chris McGinley has written the short story collection Coal Black and a full-length novel, Once These Hills. He teaches middle school in Lexington, KY, where he lives with his wife.

David Joy is the author of five novels, including his most recent, Those We Thought We Knew. In 2020, he won the Dashiell Hammett Award for When These Mountains Burn. He lives in Tuckaseegee, NC.  

Once These Hills By Chris McGinley Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9781956957242
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Shotgun Honey Books - August 25th, 2023

Coal Black: Stories By Chris McGinley Cover Image
$13.95
ISBN: 9781956957297
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Shotgun Honey Books - July 14th, 2023

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Those We Thought We Knew By David Joy Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780525536918
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: G.P. Putnam's Sons - August 1st, 2023

When These Mountains Burn By David Joy Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9780525536901
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: G.P. Putnam's Sons - July 4th, 2023

Reading with Robert Gipe & Jeff Mann

Join us for a reading with Robert Gipe & Jeff Mann at City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, March 9th at 7:00pm. Robert will reading from his latest book, Pop: An Illustrated Novel, and Jeff from his memoir, Loving Mountains, Loving Men: Memoirs of a Gay Appalachian. 

Robert Gipe won the 2015 Weatherford Award for outstanding Appalachian novel for his first novel Trampoline. His second novel, Weedeater,  was published in 2018. His third novel, Pop, ​was published in 2021. All three novels are published by Ohio University Press. In 2021, the trilogy won the Judy Gaines Young Book Award. From 1997 to 2018, Gipe directed the Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College Appalachian Program in Harlan. Gipe is founding producer of the Higher Ground community performance series, and has served as a script consultant for the Hulu series Dopesick and a producer on the feature film The Evening Hour. Gipe resides in Harlan County, Kentucky. He grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee.​

Jeff Mann grew up in Covington, Virginia, and Hinton, West Virginia, receiving degrees in English and forestry from West Virginia University. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in many publications, including Arts and Letters, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Willow Springs, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, Crab Orchard Review, and Appalachian Heritage. He has published three award-winning poetry chapbooks, Bliss, Mountain Fireflies, and Flint Shards from Sussex; five full-length books of poetry, Bones Washed with Wine, On the Tongue, Ash: Poems from Norse Mythology, A Romantic Mann, and Rebels; two collections of personal essays, Edge: Travels of an Appalachian Leather Bear and Binding the God: Ursine Essays from the Mountain South; three novellas, Devoured, included in Masters of Midnight: Erotic Tales of the Vampire,Camp Allegheny, included in History’s Passion: Stories of Sex Before Stonewall, and The Saga of Einar and Gisli, included in On the Run: Tales of Gay Pursuit and Passion; five novels, Fog: A Novel of Desire and Reprisal, which won the Pauline Réage Novel Award, Purgatory: A Novel of the Civil War, which won a Rainbow Award, Cub, Country, and Salvation: A Novel of the Civil War, which won both a Lambda Literary Award and the Pauline Réage Novel Award; a book of poetry and memoir, Loving Mountains, Loving Men; and three volumes of short fiction, Desire and Devour: Stories of Blood and Sweat, Consent:  Bondage Tales, and A History of Barbed Wire, which won a Lambda Literary Award. In 2013, he was inducted into the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival Hall of Fame. He teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

We'll have copies of the new editions of Pop and Loving Mountains, Loving Men, as well as The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Tables, in which Robert and Jeff are contributors. For reserved copies, call us at 828-586-9499. 

Pop: An Illustrated Novel By Robert Gipe Cover Image
$18.95
ISBN: 9780821425428
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Ohio University Press - March 12th, 2024

Loving Mountains, Loving Men: Memoirs of a Gay Appalachian (Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia) By Jeff Mann Cover Image
$24.95
ISBN: 9780821426036
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Ohio University Press - August 22nd, 2023

The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Tables (New Approaches to Appalachian Studies) By Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt (Editor), Lora E. Smith (Editor) Cover Image
$22.95
ISBN: 9780821423929
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Ohio University Press - November 5th, 2019

Reading with Catherine Carter & Tina Barr

Join us at City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, April 20th at 3:00pm for a poetry reading with Catherine Carter and Tina Barr. Catherine will read from her latest work, Good Morning, Unseen, and Tina from her new book of poetry, Pink Moon

In Catherine Carter’s latest chapbook, the poet considers the world beyond the surface: the lives of microbes, housekeepers, and history; tendrils of magic in both blessings and curses; and the magnetism of love, gin, sorrow, and the dark, cool earth. With her characteristic charm, compassion, and humor, Carter tells the stories of a world unseen, all with the uniquely poetic instinct to animate. Good Morning, Unseen is utter bounty in a small package—just as a chapbook should be.

The poems in Pink Moon examine powerlessness over the body as well as in the environment. They explore the Western North Carolina area inhabited by the Cherokee, focusing on local inhabitants and lore, before reaching outward to other geographies: Egypt, Botswana, Ethiopia, India, in patterns of circularity and juxtaposition. Ranging over varying subjects: the Tuskegee experiment, the Ku Klux Klan, sexual and physical abuse, love both transgressive and domestic, familial patterns of incest and greed, Pink Moon uses the environment Tina Barr inhabits, and the virus that inhabits her own body, as bridges to the virus in the body politic. They illuminate the idea of contagion, positing the issues of race, and species extinction as an epidemic. Pink Moon is the inaugural winner of the Jacar Press Editor’s Choice Award, selected by our Managing Editor, Natalie Eleanor Patterson, to an outstanding runner-up in the Jacar Press Chapbook or Full-Length Book Contests. 

Catherine is the author of three full-length collections of poetry–Larvae of the Nearest StarsThe Swamp Monster at Home, and The Memory of Gillsall with LSU Press–and a chapbook–Marks of the Witch, with Jacar Press. A professor of English at Western Carolina University, Catherine Carter teaches creative writing and English Education. She is also the interim managing editor for Cider Press Review and serves as the Jackson County representative of the North Carolina Writers’ Network.

Tina Barr’s volumes of poetry include 3 full-length books: Green Target (2017 winner of the Barrow Street Press Book Prize, judged by Patricia Spears Jones), Kaleidoscope (Iris Press), and The Gathering Eye,  (Tupelo Press Editor’s Award).  Her chapbooks include The Fugitive Eye (Painted Bride Quarterly Press contest winner, chosen by Yusef Komyunyakaa); Red Land, Black Land, winner of the Longleaf Press Chapbook Contest, Methodist College Press, NC; and At Dusk on Naskeag Point, winner of the Flume Press Chapbook Contest, Chico, CA.  She has received Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Tennessee Arts Commission, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, & elsewhere. Poems have been published in Atlanta Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Book Review, Barrow Street Journal, Crab Orchard Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Harvard Review, Louisiana Literature, Tar River Review, and elsewhere.

To order copies of these books in advance call us at (828) 586-9499. 

Gerry Wilson

Join us on Wednesday, April 10th at 6:00pm for a reading with Mississippi author Gerry Wilson. She will be presenting her new novel, That Pinson Girl in conversation with Elizabeth McRae, Associate Professor of History at Western Carolina University. 

In a bleak Mississippi farmhouse in 1918, Leona Pinson gives birth to an illegitimate son whose father she refuses to name, but who will, she is convinced, return from the war to rescue her from a hardscrabble life with a distant mother, a dangerous brother, and a dwarf aunt. When, instead, her lover returns with a wife in tow, her dreams are shattered. As her brother’ s violence escalates and her aunt flees, Leona must rely on the help of Luther Biggs, the son of Leona’ s grandfather and one of his former slaves, to protect her child. Told against the backdrop of the deprivation of World War I, the tragedies of the influenza epidemic, and the burden of generations of betrayal, That Pinson Girl unfolds in lyrical, unflinching prose, engaging the timeless issues of racism, sexism, and poverty.

A seventh-generation Mississippian and a child of the hill country she writes about in That Pinson Girl, Gerry Wilson came of age during the turbulent civil rights era. Her story collection, Crosscurrents and Other Stories, was nominated for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Fiction Award. Gerry is a recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals. That Pinson Girl is her first novel.

That Pinson Girl By Gerry Wilson Cover Image
$19.95
ISBN: 9781646034185
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Regal House Publishing - February 6th, 2024

Poetry Reading with Jim Minick, Darnell Arnoult, & Bernard Clay

Join us at City Lights Bookstore on Wednesday, March 6th at 6:00pm for a reading with the poet trio of Jim Minick, Darnell Arnoult, and Bernard Clay. Jim will read from his latest book of poems, The Intimacy of Spoons, Darnell from her upcoming release, Incantations, and Bernard from his debut book, English Lit

Jim Minick is the author or editor of eight books, including Without Warning: The Tornado of Udall, Kansas (nonfiction), “The Intimacy of Spoons” (poetry), Fire Is Your Water, (novel), and The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family. Minick’s work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Oxford American, Orion, Shenandoah, The Sun, Conversations with Wendell Berry, Appalachian Journal, Wind, and The Sun. He serves as Coeditor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel.

Darnell Arnoult is the prize-winning author of Galaxie Wagon: Poems and What Travels With Us: Poems(LSU Press) and the novel Sufficient Grace (Simon & Schuster, Inc.), which received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. Her recent poetry collection, Incantations is forthcoming from Madville Publishing. Her shorter works have appeared in a variety of journals, including Cutleaf, Appalachian Places, Appalachian Heritage, Asheville Poetry Review, Nantahala Review, Now and Then, Sandhills Review, Southern Cultures, Southern Exposure,  Southwest Review, and various anthologies. Arnoult holds an MFA from The University of Memphis, an MA in English and Creative Writing from North Carolina State University, and a BA in American Studies with a concentration in Southern Folklore from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Go Heels!

Kentucky native Bernard Clay grew up in Louisville. He has spent years developing a deep appreciation of the state's unique natural and urban areas. Bernard earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Kentucky Creative Writing Program and is a member of the Affrilachian Poets collective. His work can be found in various journals and anthologies. He currently lives on Scorpion Hollow Farm in eastern Kentucky with his herbalist partner Lauren, founder of Resilient Roots, where he homesteads and continues writing. English Lit is his first book.

We'll have copies of their books available for purchase at the event. To reserve a copy call us at (828) 586-9499. 

Pre-Order Now Badge
Incantations: poems By Darnell Arnoult Cover Image
$18.95
ISBN: 9781956440775
Availability: Coming Soon: available for pre-order now
Published: Madville Publishing LLC - March 19th, 2024

English Lit: Poems By Bernard Clay Cover Image
$18.95
ISBN: 9781735224275
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Swallow Press - August 20th, 2021

The Intimacy of Spoons: Poems By Jim Minick Cover Image
$18.95
ISBN: 9781956440751
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Madville Publishing LLC - March 1st, 2024

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