Novelist Michael Parker to Give Reading at VMI
Michael ParkerLEXINGTON, Va., Oct. 17, 2011 – Author Michael Parker will read from his most recent book, The Watery Part of the World, at Virginia Military Institute Wednesday, Oct. 19. Part of VMI’s celebration of the National Day on Writing, the presentation will include a discussion of Parker’s writing process. It will begin at 7:45 p.m. in the second-floor board room in Moody Hall on the VMI post.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing.
Named as one of Nancy Pearl’s “10 terrific summer reads” on National Public Radio, the novel originates in two facts: the disappearance in 1813 of Aaron Burr’s daughter while en route by schooner from South Carolina to New York and the departure in 1970 of the last three inhabitants, two elderly white women and one black man, of a small barrier island off the coast of North Carolina. The novel weaves a tale of adventure and longing, charting 150 years in the life and death of an island and its inhabitants – the descendants of Theodosia Burr Alston and those of a freed black man.
Parker is the author of four other novels, Hello Down There, Towns Without Rivers, Virginia Lovers, and If You Want Me To Stay, as well as two volumes of short stories. He has received fellowships in fiction from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters and the North Carolina Award for Literature. His work has been anthologized in the Pushcart, New Stories from the South and O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies. A graduate of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia, he is a professor in the master of fine arts writing program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
The presentation is sponsored by the Institute Writing Program and the Dean’s Academic Speaker Fund. It is open to the public free of charge.
–VMI–