Sharon Raynor participated in the North Carolina Humanities Council's "Let's Talk About It" series on October 10 at New Bern-Craven County Library, leading a discussion on Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie.  On October 21 at the Beaufort County Memorial Library, Raynor led a discussion on Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and on October 23, a discussion of John Hope Franklin's Reconstruction After the Civil War at the Edgecombe Public Library.

Sandra Tawake presented her essay, "New Zealand Maori Patricia Grace: Bilingual Creativity in Baby No-Eyes" at the International Conference on World Englishes at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, October 17-20, 2002.  Tawake also served on the International Planning Committee for the conference.  Patricia Grace (b.1937) is a novelist, short story writer, and children's writer, of Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa, and Te Ati Awa descent, and is affiliated to Ngati Porou by marriage.  She has gained wide recognition as a key figure in the emergence of Maori fiction in English since the 1970s.  Her work is expressive of Maori consciousness and values.  Baby No-Eyes (1998) is a novel that merges controversial actual events with stories of family history.  It is an account of the mysteries that operate at many levels between generations -- different voices interweaving family history with contemporary Maori issues.  A baby who dies becomes a "real" person who interacts with family members, and Granny Kura tells her story against a background of land occupation.

On October 18, NCLR editor Margaret Bauer gave a presentation on the journal to the College of Arts & Sciences Advancement Council in the Special Collections Dept. of Joyner Library, and on November 17, Bauer was a panelist for a session on publishing literary magazines at the North Carolina Writers Network's fall conference held  this year at Research Triangle Park, NC.

On November 13, C.W. Sullivan III was the guest speaker at the meeting of the New Bern branch of the Irish American Cultural Institute.  Sullivan talked about the research which led to the publication of Fenian Diary: Denis B. Cashman on board the Hougoumont, 1867-1868 (Wolfhound: Dublin, 2001) and read passages from Cashman's diary.  Sullivan has received two major grants from the central office of the Irish American Cultural Institute to support his research into Irish convict diaries, research which began with the original Cashman diary which is in the ECU Manuscript Archives.

C.W. Sullivan III delivered his essay, "'Grilled Chops and Great Swills of Beer: Food and Home in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows," at the October 2002 meeting of the American Folklore Society in Rochester, NY.  Sullivan's paper, which will appear in a volume of essays about traditional foodways currently being edited by James Kirkland and Karen Beardslee (who received her MA at ECU), "discusses the way in which the food events of the book provide a second thematic construct that underscores the primary thematic construct of home as a place in which one stays complete or to which one returns for fulfillment or completion."

On November 9, Tom Douglass was heard on West Virginia Public Radio as part of "In Their Own Country" series directed by singer-songwriter Kate Long. The hour long program reviewed the work of Breece D'J Pancake.  Other writers in the program series include: Jayne Anne Phillips, Pinckney Benedict, Mary Lee Settle, Keith Maillard, Denise Giardina, Davis Grubb, Richard Currey, Stephen Coonts, Maggie Anderson, and Cynthia Rylant.

Seodial Deena participated in the "Letís Talk About It" series on November 21 in Columbia, NC, presenting "Celie's Quest for Love in Alice Walker's The Color Purple."  Bryan Oesterreich also participated in the series, discussing John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany on November 18 at the Carteret County Public Library.