Mother’s Day Book Panel at the Five Forks Library

Celebrate mothers everywhere with a Mother’s Day book panel at the Five Forks library on Saturday, May 4 at 2:00 pm. This panel will feature Margaret Rich, Samia Serageldin, Redge Hanes, and Sharon Swanson discussing an anthology of creative nonfiction.

This event is FREE and open to the public, but a purchase of Mothers and Strangers: Essays on Motherhood from the New South is required to enter the signing line. Books can be purchased at the event, online, in store, or by calling Fiction Addiction at 864-675-0540.

In Mothers and Strangers: Essays on Motherhood from the New South, twenty-eight writers set out to discover what they know, and don’t know, about the person they call Mother. Celebrated writers Samia Serageldin and Lee Smith have curated a diverse and insightful collection that challenges stereotypes about mothers and expands our notions of motherhood in the South. The mothers in these essays were shaped, for good and bad, by the economic and political crosswinds of their time. Whether their formative experience was the Great Depression or the upheavals of the 1970s, their lives reflected their era and influenced how they raised their children. The writers in Mothers and Strangers explore the reliability of memory, examine their family dynamics, and come to terms with the past.

In addition to the editors, contributors include Belle Boggs, Marshall Chapman, Hal Crowther, Clyde Edgerton, Marianne Gingher, Jaki Shelton Green, Sally Greene, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Eldridge “Redge” Hanes, Lynden Harris, Randall Kenan, Phillip Lopate, Michael Malone, Frances Mayes, Jill McCorkle, Melody Moezzi, Elaine Neil Orr, Steven Petrow, Margaret Rich, Omid Safi, James Seay, Alan Shapiro, Bland Simpson, Sharon K. Swanson, and Daniel Wallace.

Lee Smith began writing stories at the age of nine and selling them for a nickel apiece. Since then, she has written seventeen works of fiction, including Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, and, most recently, Guests on Earth. She has received many awards, including the North Carolina Award for Literature and an Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; her novel The Last Girls was a New York Times bestseller as well as winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with her husband, the writer Hal Crowther.

Hal Crowther is a journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in TimeNewsweek, the Atlanta Journal ConstitutionThe Oxford AmericanGranta, the Independent, the Progressive Populist, and other independent weeklies around the country. He is the author of four books of essays: An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. MenckenGather at the RiverCathedrals of Kudzu; and Unarmed but Dangerous: A Withering Attack on All Things Phony, Foolish, and Fundamentally Wrong with America Today. Crowther is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Lillian Smith Book Award, and the Book of the Year award for essays from Foreward Reviews. He has been named a finalist for the Magazine Award and for the National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism and for nonfiction. He lives in Hillsborough, NC, with his wife, novelist Lee Smith.

Samia Serageldin was born in Egypt, educated in Europe, and emigrated to the United States in 1980. She is the author of an autobiographical novel, The Cairo House, tracing political developments in Egypt over the past three decades. She is the author of papers on topics including Arab American writing and gender and Islam in Egypt. Since September 11 she has been active as a speaker in various public forums on Islam and on international events.

Margaret Rich is a Greenville author who will be speaking on the panel at the Five Forks library. We look forward to hearing from her!

If you cannot make the event, you can reserve a personalized copy of the author’s book by contacting Fiction Addiction in advance at 864-675-0540 or at [email protected].