EMRYS Announces 2014 Fall Reading Room Schedule

GREENVILLE, SC – EMRYS, a local non-profit organization dedicated to building a community of readers and writers, has announced its 2014 Fall Reading Room schedule.

EMRYS began hosting the Reading Room series in 1990 as a means for published poets, novelists, and essayists of the Southeast to share their work and engage other friends of the arts via a lively Q&A segment.

Currently, Reading Rooms are held the 4^th Monday of every month (except November, December, June and July) at Gringo’s Cantina, located in downtown Greenville at 11 West Camperdown Way. Readings start at 7 p.m., but patrons are encouraged to come at 6 p.m. and order dinner (please make reservations for dinner by calling 864-509-6344).

August 25 – Kate Sweeney and Jeremy Jones

Kate Sweeney lives in Atlanta where she writes and creates public radio stories. While pursuing her MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, she spent time with obit writers, funeral directors and ordinary Americans who found themselves involved with death and memorialization. The result is the popular nonfiction book American Afterlife (University of Georgia Press). American Afterlife explores the experiences of individual Americans involved with death in a culture where even discussing such things is practically taboo. These chapters follow ordinary people making memorial choices as well as the purveyors of those choices to investigate how we memorialize our dead, where these practices came from, and what this says about us.

The details in these personal stories build upon one another to reveal a landscape that’s usually hidden in our ordinary lives—until the day it’s not. At once strange and familiar, and by turns odd, poignant, and very funny, American Afterlife brings fresh insight to the oldest of concerns.
Jeremy B. Jones earned his M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. His essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Crab Orchard Review, Our State Magazine, and Quarterly West. He teaches in the English Department at Western Carolina University. In his first book, Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland, Jones explores how landscape shapes the identity of its inhabitants and how we are marked by the places we call home. He tells how he and his wife move into a small house above the creek where his family had settled 200 years prior, and he takes a job alongside his former teachers in the local elementary school. But living at the foot of Bearwallow Mountain after a year in Gracias, Honduras, makes Jones realize he has lost touch with his Appalachian-crafted voice. Somehow, he must “reclaim echoes of a lost voice” and “make a home of two minds.” Thus, he sets out on a search that sends him burrowing into the past—hunting buried treasure and POW camps, unearthing Civil War graves and family feuds, exploring gated communities and tourist traps, encountering changed accents and immigrant populations, tracing Walmart’s sidewalks and carved-out mountains—and pondering the future.

September 22 – George Singleton

George Singleton is the author of two novels and six collections of short stories, most recentlyBetween Wrecks, by Dzanc Books. He is a 2009 Guggenheim fellow, and the 2011 winner of the Hillsdale Award for Fiction by The Fellowship of Southern Writers. His stories have appeared in the “Atlantic Monthly,” “Harper’s,” “Playboy,” “Zoetrope,” “Georgia Review,” “Southern Review,” “Virginia Quarterly Review,” “Shenandoah,” “Oxford American,” “Kenyon Review,” “Epoch,” “Glimmer Train,” “Mid-American Review,” “Ontario Review,” “New England Review,” and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in nine editions of New Stories from the South.
He has taught on the secondary, post-secondary, and graduate levels. For thirteen years he taught fiction writing at the SC Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville. He now holds John C. Cobb Chair in the Humanities at Wofford College.

October 27 – Terresa Cooper Haskew

Terresa Cooper Haskew’s work won the Emrys Journal 2013 Nancy Dew Taylor Poetry Award and the Press 53 2010 First Prize for Poetry. Her poems and short stories have appeared in journals such as Atlanta Review, Cold Mountain, Jasper, Main Street Rag, Pearl and others. Her story “Living the Dream,” (Altered States anthology), was showcased in 2013 as a short film by Ron Hagell & Shirley Smith. Breaking Commandments, Haskew’s poetry chapbook, is available online through Main Street Rag or in the following Greenville stores: Fiction Addiction, Joe’s Place, and Upcountry History Museum.

Terresa grew up in North Florida, but she and her husband, Ben, call Greenville, SC home. She works full time for an engineering and construction firm in an executive support role. The Haskews have three grown children and three grandchildren. They enjoy spending time at Lake Murray, near Prosperity, SC, the birthplace of many of Terresa’s poems and stories.

 
EMRYS nurtures creativity among emerging and established writers.  The organization seeks to expand the impact of the literary arts and collaborates across a wide variety of art forms to give voice to the written word.  For more information – or to join EMRYS – visit: www.emrys.org