5th Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming: Author Information

Featured Authors

Keynote Speaker: Clyde Edgerton

The Literary Homecoming keynote address will be presented by Clyde Edgerton, author of several novels, including Raney, Walking across Egypt, Lunch at the Piccadilly, and his new novel, The Bible Salesman. Edgerton’s awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Lyndhurst Fellowship; the North Carolina Award for Literature; the Raleigh Award for Fiction; the Ragan Award for Nonfiction, a Distinguished Alumni Award from his alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and five notable book awards from the New York Times. Edgerton is a professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

Roberts Award for Literary Inspiration Presentation

The Roberts Award for Literary Inspiration is given each year to a North Carolina writer whose works have left considerable positive impacts on the literature of the Old North State. The award is named after Snow and B.W.C. Roberts who, in 2001, donated more than 1,200 pieces of original North Carolina literature to Joyner Library’s North Carolina Collection.

2008 Roberts Award recipient

Doris Betts

Doris Betts was born in Statesville, NC. She won the Mademoiselle College Fiction contest in 1953 for the story “Mr. Shawn and Father Scott.” She has received three Sir Walter Raleigh Awards for the best fiction by a North Carolinian and the North Carolina Award for Literature, and she has been inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. Betts has also won a Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing, the Award of Merit Medal for Short Stories from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the John Dos Passos Award. Betts joined the faculty of UNC–Chapel Hill in 1966 and was named UNC Alumni Distinguished Professor of English in 1980. At UNC, she received the Tanner Award for distinguished undergraduate teaching and the Katherine Carmichael Teaching Award. “The Ugliest Pilgrim,” the most widely printed of her stories, became an Academy Award winner as a short film entitled Violet, and in 1998 was the basis of a musical that won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Upon her retirement from teaching, an endowed chair was named in her honor, The Doris Betts Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing.

Speakers for the Evening Event

Randall Kenan

Randall Kenan is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and the Sherwood Anderson Award and has also received the North Carolina Award for Literature, the John Dos Passos Award, and a Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His short story collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992) was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named a New York Times Notable Book. Kenan is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kenan’s works deal with what it means to be black, gay, and living in the south. His books include A Visitation of Spirits and Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.

Bland Simpson

Bland Simpson is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction and a member of the Tony Award-winning, internationally acclaimed stringband the Red Clay Ramblers. Simpson has been awarded the North Carolina Award for Fine Arts, a Tanner Faculty Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Governor's “Conservation Communicator of the Year” Award and the North Carolina Folklore Society's Brown-Hudson Award. Simpson is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill..

Speakers for Saturday Events

Wanda Canada
Wanda Canada has been a writer, real estate broker, old house renovator, and lobbyist. She currently owns Edgewater Press and is the author of two mystery novels, Island Murders and Cape Fear Murders. Canada is currently working on a third book in her Carroll Davenport series. Canada has participated in Wilmington’s annual Cape Fear Crime Festival since its beginning in 2001 and has had poetry published by the North Carolina Poetry Society.

Eloise Greenfield
Children’s author Eloise Greenfield of Parmele, NC, has received many honors and awards, including the Coretta Scott King Award, the Hurston/Wright Foundation's North Star Award and the Wheatley Award for lifetime achievement, and the Hope S. Dean Award from the Foundation for Children's Literature. In 1999 she became a member of the National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. Her poetry collection Honey, I Love received the Recognition of Merit Award from the George C. Stone Center for Children's Books, and another of her poetry volumes, In the Land of Words, received the Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children, given by the National Council of Teachers of English. Her biography for children, Rosa Parks, received the Carter G. Woodson Book Award.

Jim Grimsley

Jim Grimsley, a playwright and novelist, was born in Rocky Mount, NC. His first novel, Winter Birds, won the 1995 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Prix Charles Brisset, given by the French Academy of Physicians; it also received a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation as one of three finalists for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Also set in eastern North Carolina, his second novel, Dream Boy, won the 1996 Award for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Literature from the American Library Association and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Other Lamda finalists are his novel Comfort and Joy and his collection of plays, Mr. Universe, and his first fantasy novel, Kirith Kirin, won the Lambda Literary Award in the Science Fiction/Horror category.

Mike Hamerr Mike Hamer

Mike Hamer has been entertaining adults and children with American folk songs, classic popular songs and children's songs for the past 30 years. Besides playing acoustic music, Mike plays swing and rhythm and blues with the Lemon Sisters and Rutabaga Brothers and has an Americana-style band that plays his original songs called Mike Hamer and the Rhinoceroses with the Angelic Choir. When a diving accident in 1985 left him a quadriplegic and unable to play his bass and guitar, Mike took up the hammered dulcimer and became a wheelchair dancer. Mike has released four albums of his original songs on the Black Swamp Music label.

Margaret Maron
Mystery writer Margaret Maron is a founding member of Sisters in Crime and served as its third president. She is also a past president of the American Crime Writers League and Mystery Writers of America. Maron’s novel Bootlegger's Daughter was the first novel to ever win all four of the major mystery awards: the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Anthony Award, the Agatha Award, and the Macavity. Maron’s Deborah Knott mystery series contains 13 novels, including Last Lessons of Summer, which received the Raleigh Award, and her newest novel, Death’s Half Acre, due out in 2008.

Shelia Moses Shelia P. Moses
Poet, novelist, playwright, and producer Shelia P. Moses is the ninth of ten children raised in Rich Square, NC, where she set her novel The Legend of Buddy Bush. This book is a Coretta Scott King Award Honor Book and National Book Award Finalist. Moses continued this story in The Return of Buddy Bush and is also the author of The Baptism, about family life in a small North Carolina town, and the fictional slave narrative I, Dred Scott, which was an ALA Best Books for Young Adults Nominee.

Minnie Bruce Pratt
Minnie Bruce Pratt earned her PhD in English literature at UNC–Chapel Hill. For five years, she was a member of the editorial collective of Feminary: A Feminist Journal for the South. She has published six volumes of poetry and has received a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lillian Hellman–Dashiell Hammett Award. Her selected poems collection, The Dirt She Ate, received the 2003 Lambda Literary Award for Poetry. Pratt is professor of women’s studies and writing at Syracuse University.