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A lively and poignant exploration of life’s latter decades.

In The Rest of Our Lives, memoirist Judy Goldman brings her devoted readers dispatches from the edge of life, when turning eighty can be as surprising and baffling as losing your virginity or seeing The Beatles at Shea Stadium. In this lively and poignant exploration of aging, Goldman circles to those other uncharted moments of our lives when we are at once anxious and excited about just what might happen next. Goldman’s telling and retelling of pivotal stories of her own family and friends—romances, births, late-night taxi-cab rides, falls, frailty, and even death—are altogether new in her hands.

Grieving her father’s death, Charlotte McConnell seeks solace at the Outer Banks inn owned by her best friend's family, but she finds them dealing with their own family drama and soon lands in the center of an unexpected love triangle.

Her hotel family welcomes Charlotte with chowder dinners and a cozy room, but her friend Evie has a looming life change of her own, and soon Charlotte seeks other attractions to navigate her grief. Will she, like in some television movie, find her way back through a romance, or are there larger forces at play on Hatteras Island? Heather Frese, winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize and author of The Baddest Girl on the Planet, sets Charlotte on a beautifully rendered course through human frailty and longing, unrelenting science, and the awesome forces of the Carolina coast.

Grieving her father’s death, Charlotte McConnell seeks solace at the Outer Banks inn owned by her best friend's family, but she finds them dealing with their own family drama and soon lands in the center of an unexpected love triangle.

Her hotel family welcomes Charlotte with chowder dinners and a cozy room, but her friend Evie has a looming life change of her own, and soon Charlotte seeks other attractions to navigate her grief. Will she, like in some television movie, find her way back through a romance, or are there larger forces at play on Hatteras Island? Heather Frese, winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize and author of The Baddest Girl on the Planet, sets Charlotte on a beautifully rendered course through human frailty and longing, unrelenting science, and the awesome forces of the Carolina coast.

From his early work as the first director of the Black Coalition of New Haven during the Civil Rights Movement to his tenure as president and CEO of the National Urban League, Hugh B. Price’s varied and highly successful career has been unwaveringly dedicated to social justice and racial equality. Price writes about growing up in a neighborhood near Howard University in Washington, attending a newly integrated high school, and studying at Amherst and Yale Law School. He also traces his forbearers, among them Nero Hawley, who fought at Valley Forge under George Washington; George and Rebecca Latimer, who escaped slavery by stowing away on a boat and traveling north as master and slave; and Lewis Latimer, who worked with Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison.

Price comes from a long line of radicals, and his own actions demanded change. He defended affirmative action, helped repair relations between the black and Jewish communities, and pressured the federal government to combat police brutality and racial profiling. “People who believe a problem can be solved tend to get busy solving it,” William Raspberry wrote in the Washington Post. “Hugh B. Price is a believer.” This African-American Life chronicles not only Price’s experiences and achievements, but also a lifetime of creating opportunities for others to succeed.

Law professor and civil rights activist Geeta N. Kapur provides analysis and commentary on the story of systemic racism in leadership, scholarship, and organizational foundations at the University of North Carolina.

The University of North Carolina is the oldest public university in the US, with the cornerstone for the first dormitory, Old East, laid in 1793. At that ceremony, the enslaved people who would literally build that structure were not acknowledged; they were not even present. In fact, 158 years passed before Black students were admitted to this university in Chapel Hill, and it was another 66 years after that before students forcibly removed the long-criticized Confederate “Silent Sam” monument. Indeed, this university, revered in the state and the nation, has been entwined with white supremacy and institutional racism throughout its history—and the struggle continues today.

To Drink from the Well: The Struggle for Racial Equality at the Nation's Oldest Public University explores the history of UNC by exposing the plain and uncomfortable truth behind the storied brick walkways, “historic” statuary, and picturesque covered well, the icon of the campus.

Law professor and civil rights activist Geeta N. Kapur chronicles the racism within the university and traces its insidious effects on students, faculty, and even the venerable Tarheel sports programs. Kapur tells this story not as a historian, but as a citizen speaking to her fellow citizens. She relies on the historical record to tell her story, and where that record is lacking, she elaborates on that record, augmenting and deconstructing the standard chronology. Kapur explores both the Chapel Hill campus and a parallel movement in nearby Durham, where a growing Black middle class helped to create North Carolina Central University, a historically Black public university.

A short story collection exploring cultural complexities in China, the Chinese diaspora in America, and the world at large.

In a vibrant and illuminating follow-up to her award-winning story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, May-lee Chai’s latest collection Tomorrow in Shanghai explores multicultural complexities through lenses of class, wealth, age, gender, and sexuality—always tracking the nuanced, knotty, and intricate exchanges of interpersonal and institutional power. 

These stories transport the reader, variously: to rural China, where a city doctor harvests organs to fund a wedding and a future for his family; on a vacation to France, where a white mother and her biracial daughter cannot escape their fraught relationship; inside the unexpected romance of two Chinese-American women living abroad in China; and finally, to a future Chinese colony on Mars, where an aging working-class woman lands a job as a nanny. Chai's stories are essential reading for an increasingly globalized world.

Shenandoah—most often translated as "Daughter of the Stars"—is one of the loveliest names in the language. Backroads travelers will find that it fits the Valley perfectly. Most people know the Shenandoah Valley for its Civil War–era history, from Robert E. Lee's capture of John Brown at Harpers Ferry in 1859 to Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign of 1862 to the Battle of New Market in 1864. Fewer know that the Winchester area was home to George Washington, explorer Richard Byrd, novelist Willa Cather, and singer Patsy Cline. Or that Thomas Jefferson owned the geologic wonder known as Natural Bridge. Or that the McCormick Farm near Steeles Tavern was the site of a revolutionary breakthrough in agriculture in the early 1800s. The word Shenandoah may have had as many spellings as there are stars in the sky, but the area’s scenic vistas are practically endless. Travelers will know they've reached the Valley when every turn in the road reveals another photoworthy image of stunning mountain views, scenic rolling fields, or quaint country towns and villages. From the picturesque Goshen Pass, to the winding country roads between Lexington and Staunton, to the Mennonite farms around Harrisonburg, to the dramatic river confluence at Harpers Ferry, the Shenandoah Valley has been attracting visitors and inspiring artists, photographers, and writers for more than 200 years. The thirteen tours in this book explore areas of unspoiled countryside and Appalachian landscapes within easy range of metropolitan centers like Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Norfolk.

Originally from San Antonio, Andrea Sutcliffe has a journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin. She was a writer, editor, and publications manager in the Washington, DC, area for twenty years. Her writing and editing career began in 1990 as director of the EEI Press in Alexandria, Virginia. In 1996, Andrea Sutcliffe moved to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to devote herself full-time to writing. Andrea’s love of her new home in the mountains of western Virginia, and a desire to learn more about the region’s fascinating history, led to her book, Touring the Shenandoah Valley Backroads.

The Triangle is consistently rated one of the best places in the nation to live and work. Its rapidly growing population has generated a need for housing, shopping centers, and infrastructure—and for recreational facilities. Trails of the Triangle describes over 400 trails within a 50-mile radius of the Triangle, whether on federal, state, city/county, or private property. Trails range in distance from a few yards, such as the 92-yard Honeysuckle Lane Trail in Fuquay-Varina to the 50-mile Falls Lake Trail. There are residential trails such as Shelley Lake Trail, which is so popular that it has a speed limit of 10 miles per hour and a centerline to separate traffic. There are trails in remote forests, such as the Summit Loop Trail, where you may not see another person. You can find trails for equestrians, in-line skaters, cyclists, and even the differently abled.

Before his death, Allen de Hart hiked more than 53,000 miles in 46 states and 18 foreign countries. He is the author of nine books and trail guides for the Carolinas and other Southeastern states. He built his first trail with his two brothers to create a shortcut from their family’s farm to the local school. After earning a master’s degree from the University of Virginia and serving nine years in the United States Army, de Hart moved with his wife to Louisburg, NC, where he taught history and served as director of public affairs for Louisburg College.

This insightful and often witty collection of essays charts the making of a reluctant disability activist—including his commentary for NPR, the New York Times and elsewhere.

Ben Mattlin was born in 1962 with spinal muscular atrophy, a congenital and progressive neuromuscular weakness. He never stood or walked but grew up expecting a normal life. In this book of essays, he chronicles that life and also charts his growth as a reluctant disability activist and public intellectual.

Mattlin’s disability was from birth. Raised in a family that insisted that he be educated in a mainstream setting, he never thought about his disability as being an obstacle until adulthood. It was not until he had graduated from Harvard and could not find a job that he began to understand what disability rights activists were talking about.

These collected short pieces chronicle Mattlin’s intellectual coming-of-age including his beginnings, difficult conversations about disability, the social aspects of being disabled in a nondisabled world, and a wider perspective as the author looks back on his sixty years of disability. The book contains a variety of essays intermixed with a few edited podcast transcripts. Some of the pieces are deeply personal; others are stridently political. All of them are guaranteed to make readers see life and the world in a new way.

Altogether, this collection is a frank, unsentimental examination of some of the most important and moving issues of our day—always rendered with intelligence, sensitivity, and a liberal sprinkling of humor.

A documentary-style collection of stories, poems, essays, and interviews by Southeastern Native American women.

Upon Her Shoulders is a collection of stories, poems, and prose by Southeastern Native American women whose narratives attest to the hard work and activism required to keep their communities well and safe. This collection highlights Native female voices in the Southeast, a region and its peoples rarely covered in other publications.

The editors have deep roots in the scholarship and culture of Native women. Featured prominently is the Lumbee community, where two of the editors (members of the Lumbee tribe themselves) teach at the nearby University of North Carolina at Pembroke, a center for scholarship about the Lumbee people.

This volume honors the Native American tradition of passing on knowledge through stories and oral histories. With contributions by both professional and everyday writers, the collection spotlights these societies that have raised girls from an early age to be independent and competent leaders, to access traditional Native spirituality despite religious oppression, and to fight for justice for themselves and other Native people across the nation in the face of legal and societal oppression.

In the title story of this timely and innovative collection, a young woman wearing a Prada coat attempts to redeem a coupon for plastic storage bins while her in-laws are at home watching the Chinese news and taking her private phone calls. It is the lively and wise juxtaposition of cultures, generations, and emotions that characterize May-lee Chai’s amazing stories. Within them, readers will find a complex blend of cultures spanning China, the Chinese diaspora in America, and finally, the world at large.

With luminous prose and sharp-eyed observations, Chai reveals her characters’ hopes and fears, and our own: a grieving historian seeking solace from an old lover in Beijing, a young girl discovering her immigrant mother's infidelity, workers constructing a shopping mall in central China who make a shocking discovery. Families struggle with long-held grudges, reinvent traditions, and make mysterious visits to shadowy strangers from their past—all rendered with economy and beauty.

With hearts that break and sometimes mend, with families who fight and sometimes forgive, the timely stories in Useful Phrases for Immigrants illuminate complicated lives with empathy and passion. Chai's stories are essential reading for an increasingly globalized world.

Mile for mile, St. Simons Island—one of Georgia’s Golden Isles—boasts as much history as any community on the East Coast. Originally an Indian hunting ground, it has been occupied or invaded by Spanish missionaries, British settlers, planters and their slaves, the Union army, the United States Navy, and developers and tourists. The seventeen narratives in Voices from St. Simons represent an “oral archaeological dig,” writes editor Stephen Doster. Many of those interviewed are descendants of masters and slaves. Surprisingly, they speak of racial issues with greater compassion than bitterness. But the volume encompasses much more than that. Here, the people of the Golden Isles recall waving farewell to Paul Redfern when his airplane took off from a sandy beach on his ill-fated attempt to outdo Charles Lindbergh. They describe jumping into a fast boat and riding to the rescue of merchant sailors torpedoed by a German U-boat. They tell of playing childhood sports—and dominating the competition—alongside future NFL legend Jim Brown, who was raised on St. Simons. They remember piloting the ship that, due to a helmsman’s error, hit the Sidney Lanier Bridge, causing one of the worst such disasters in American history. “In some respects, the narratives reveal a plot of ground that time forgot,” Doster writes. “They present the reflections of a cross-section of ordinary people who lived during extraordinary times.”

Stephen Doster was born in 1959 in Kingston-Upon-Thames, England, and moved with his parents and four siblings to St. Simons Island, Georgia, in the early 1960s. His ties to the island date to the early 1900s, when his father’s family vacationed there before the construction of a mainland causeway. His grandparents permanently moved to St. Simons in the 1940s, building on the grounds where a Spanish mission once stood. Growing up on the island, Doster remembers the place as a “Mayberry with tides,” where he and neighborhood kids played baseball on the beach, sneaked into a resort hotel pool after football practices, and explored the island’s woods and tidal creeks. His early recollections include seeing navy hurricane hunters fly over the Atlantic in search of storms before the days of satellites, viewing open Indian graves during an archaeological dig, evacuating the island at Hurricane Dora’s approach, and returning to the destruction left in its wake. After graduating from the University of Georgia with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in 1983, Doster headed to Nashville, Tennessee where he has lived and worked since. Though he has been a resident of Nashville for over 20 years, St. Simons has always been close to his heart. In 2002, John F. Blair published his debut novel, Lord Baltimore, about a young man’s journey on the Georgia coast between Savannah and St. Simons. Voices from St. Simons is essentially Doster’s effort to preserve the legacy of the area. For decades, he heard “local residents utter the famous sentiment that someone should have recorded so-and-so’s recollections before she died.” Reading the obituary of a former elementary school teacher inspired him to set up face-to-face and telephone interviews that began his oral archaeological dig. Doster works at Vanderbilt University and lives in Nashville with his wife, Anne.

John F. Blair, Publisher, continues its Real Voices, Real History™ series with Voices from the Outer Banks. This volume presents the actual words of the people who lived the uncommonly rich history of this chain of barrier islands stretching from the Virginia border southward through Cape Lookout. Readers will enjoy contemporary accounts of the first British settlement in North America and the birth of the first English child on American soil. They’ll read 18th-century letters, articles, and poems about the bloody death of Blackbeard, arguably the most famous of all the pirates. They’ll read the news account of the first powered airplane flights in human history. And the editorial that created America’s first national seashore. And the words of family members who once inhabited the nation’s most iconic lighthouse—part of a matched set of four. Topics include “the Graveyard of the Atlantic,” in a nod to the rough waters that over the centuries have claimed hundreds of vessels, and “Torpedo Junction,” site of “the Great American Turkey Shoot,” the latter nickname bestowed by German submariners during World War II. The volume includes first-person accounts of Civil War battles, a freedmen’s colony, hunt clubs that drew the first wealthy tourists, and lifesavers who used horses to pull surfboats to the water and fired lines by cannon to wrecked vessels. Readers will even hear contemporary stories of the Boy Scout troop that rode ponies descended from ancient shipwrecked animals.

Stephen Kirk was an editor at John F. Blair, Publisher, for 27 years. He has a B.A. from St. Lawrence University and an M.F.A. from UNC-Greensboro. A story he wrote while working on his M.F.A. appeared in the Greensboro Review and was subsequently selected by John Updike for reprinting in the Best American Short Stories series. Since then, he has written First in Flight: The Wright Brothers in North Carolina and Scribblers: Stalking the Authors of Appalachia. He lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

"More often, however, Kirk wisely lets his “Voices” do the talking. The result is a pocket volume which should make old Banks hands feel nostalgic and strangers want to go." - Ben Steelman Star News Online

During the first half of the 19th century, as many as 100,000 Native Americans were relocated west of the Mississippi River from their homelands in the East. The best known of these forced emigrations was the Cherokee Removal of 1838. Christened Nu-No-Du-Na-Tlo-Hi-Lu—literally “the Trail Where They Cried”—by the Cherokees, it is remembered today as the Trail of Tears. In Voices from the Trail of Tears, editor Vicki Rozema re-creates this tragic period in American history by letting eyewitnesses speak for themselves. Using newspaper articles and editorials, journal excerpts, correspondence, and official documents, she presents a comprehensive overview of the Trail of Tears—the events leading to the Indian Removal Act, the Cherokees’ conflicting attitudes toward removal, life in the emigrant camps, the routes westward by land and water, the rampant deaths in camp and along the trail, the experiences of the United States military and of the missionaries and physicians attending the Cherokees, and the difficulties faced by the tribe in the West. “O what a year it has been!” wrote one witness accompanying a detachment westward in December 1838. “O what a sweeping wind has gone over, and carried its thousands into the grave.” This book will lead readers to both rethink American history and celebrate the spirit of those who survived.

Vicki Rozema is the author of Cherokee Voices: Early Accounts of Cherokee Life in the East and Voices from the Trail of Tears. Also an acclaimed photographer, she is a history professor at the University of Tennessee. The first edition of Footsteps of the Cherokees received an Award of Merit from the Tennessee Historical Commission in 1996. Her honors include the 2014 McClung Award for an article that appeared in the 2013 Journal of East Tennessee History and the Native American Eagle Award for her writings on the Cherokee.

"This work, like Cherokee Voices, is a compilation of letters, newspaper editorials, journal excerpts, church records, and military documents, written by a diverse group of Cherokees and Euroamericans. As the title suggests, Voices from the Trail of Tears is a moving account of the forced removal of thousands of Cherokees in the 1830s; Rozema does a remarkable job of 're-creating this tragic period in American history by letting eyewitnesses speak for themselves.'" - Ginny Carney Studies in American Indian Literature

Voices of Cherokee Women is a compelling collection of first-person accounts by Cherokee women. It includes letters, diaries, newspaper articles, oral histories, ancient myths, and accounts by travelers, traders, and missionaries who encountered the Cherokees from the 16th century to the present. Among the stories told by these “voices” are those of Rebecca Neugin being carried as a child on the Trail of Tears; Mary Stapler Ross seeing her beautiful Rose Cottage burned to the ground during the Civil War; Hannah Hicks watching as marauders steal her food and split open her feather beds, scattering the feathers in the wind; and girls at the Cherokee Female Seminary studying the same curriculum as women at Mount Holyoke. Voices of Cherokee Women recounts how Cherokee women went from having equality within the tribe to losing much of their political and economic power in the 19th century to regaining power in the 20th, as Joyce Dugan and Wilma Mankiller became the first female chiefs of the Cherokee Nation. The book’s publication was timed for the commemoration of the 175th anniversary of the Trail of Tears.

Carolyn Ross Johnston has a B.A. from Samford University and a Ph.D. in history from the University of California–Berkeley. Her previous publications Cherokee Women in Crisis: Removal, The Civil War, and Allotment, 1838-1907; Sexual Power: Feminism and the Family in America; Jack London: An American Radical; and My Father’s War: Fighting with the Buffalo Soldiers in World War II. A recipient of Woodrow Wilson and Danforth fellowships and a Pulitzer-prize nominee, Johnston teaches at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, where she is professor of history and American studies and the Elie Wiesel Professor of Humane Letters.

"In her spirited and well-sourced collection, Johnston...unfolds history through the voices of people who remembered terrible events....An academic account that respectfully resurrects long-dead voices from a people who still have a lot to tell us." - Kirkus Reviews"

On February 11, 1780, a British army led by General Sir Henry Clinton came ashore on Johns Island, South Carolina. By the end of March, the British had laid siege to Charleston, the most important city south of Philadelphia. By the middle of May, they had taken the city and the American army defending it. On March 15, 1781, that same British army left the field at Guilford Courthouse exhausted, decimated, stripped of supplies and rations, and victorious in name only. Its march away from Guilford Courthouse would end only a few months later at Yorktown, Virginia, where it would surrender. How did this happen? Although historians have debated the causes for centuries, they have often ignored how it felt to live, fight, and survive. What was it like to be British or American, Tory or Whig, regular soldier or militia, partisan, outlaw, or would-be bystander as the two sides (and those who drifted from side to side) went at each other with a fury across the Carolina countryside?

Through the eyewitness accounts of those who fought the battles and skirmishesVoices of the American Revolution in the Carolinas provides the reader with firsthand looks at how it felt. The entries in this volume are taken from first-person narratives by those on the scene, from officers such as Henry Lee and Banastre Tarleton to teenaged scouts such as Thomas Young and James Collins. Some narratives, like Daniel Morgan's report of the Battle of Cowpens, were written immediately or soon after the action; others, like Young's, were written when the boy soldiers had become old men. Some were written (and sometimes embellished) specifically for publication, while others were written as private correspondence or official reports. Some express a great deal of emotion and describe the authors' immediate experiences of war, while others concentrate on logistics, strategy, tactics, and the practical realities of an army battle; some, like Lee's, manage to do both.

The American Revolution in the Carolinas was nasty, brutish, and relatively short, though it must not have felt short to those who lived through it. It moved with a furious swiftness, the center of action shifting from Charleston to Camden, from Charlotte to King's Mountain, and from Cowpens to Guilford Courthouse in a matter of months, weeks, or sometimes days. Accounts that describe what it was actually like at all of these hot spots as well as the events that lead up to the actual fighting are included in this book. Voices of the American Revolution in the Carolinas gives the reader some idea of what it was like to be part of a war when two states were ripped apart but a nation was made.

Ed Southern was a Wake Forest senior studying in London when he walked into the 200-year-old bookshop Hatchard’s and realized how excited the possibilities presented by shelves full of books made him. After graduation, he worked at Reynolda House Museum of American Art. Hanging around after he finished setting up for lectures, concerts, performances, and classes gave him an excellent postgraduate education in the liberal arts, which came in handy later when he dropped out of graduate school. He went to work for one of the major bookselling chains and was a member of the training team sent to open the company’s first store in London, a massive four-story media emporium on Oxford Street. It was a bit like coming full circle, but not quite. A year later, he left the bookstore and went to work for John F. Blair, Publisher, as the sales director. He presently serves as the executive director of the North Carolina Writers Network.

In the 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project undertook a massive effort at gathering the oral testimony of former slaves. Those ex-slaves were in their declining years by the time of the Great Depression, but Elizabeth Sparks, Elige Davison, and others like them nonetheless provided a priceless record of life under the yoke: where slaves lived, how they were treated, what they ate, how they worked, how they adjusted to freedom. Here, Belinda Hurmence presents the interviews of 21 former Virginia slaves. This is a companion volume to Hurmence’s popular collections of North Carolina and South Carolina slave narratives, My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk About Slavery and Before Freedom, When I Just Can Remember.

Belinda Hurmence was born in Oklahoma, raised in Texas, and educated at the University of Texas and Columbia University. She has written several novels for young people, including Tough Tiffany (an ALA Notable Book), A Girl Called Boy (winner of the Parents' Choice Award), Tancy (winner of a Golden Kite Award), and The Nightwalker. She now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Well, Shut My Mouth! The Sweet Potatoes Restaurant Cookbook is recipes—recipes from the restaurant, recipes from the families of chef Stephanie Tyson and co-owner Vivian Joiner, recipes that are Southern, plain and simple. In creating the recipes for Sweet Potatoes, Tyson used all of her influences Geechee flavor from Joiner’s father, who was from the Hilton Head area of South Carolina; her mother’s working-woman “out of the can and into the pan” shortcuts; and her training in culinary arts at Baltimore International College and her later work in South Carolina, the Florida Keys, Arizona, and Maryland. Just the names of the recipes in this book are enough to whet one’s appetite: Pimento Cheese Fondue; Sweet Potato, Corn, and Country Ham Risotto; Gullah Shrimp and Crab Pilau; Slow Cooker Chocolate Stout Pot Roast; Down-Home ’Tata Salad; Molasses Dijon Dressing; Sweet Potato Bread Pudding with Pecan Crunch Topping; and many others. Most recipes include a bit of flavorful commentary from the chef, such as this tip for Spicy Greens: “If you are faint of heart (burn), eliminate the red pepper altogether.” Or the brief definition that introduces Crackling Cornbread: “Cracklings are deep-fried crispy skins of various animals—in this case, pork.” Well, Shut My Mouth! is also the history of the two women who started a locally and nationally acclaimed restaurant (Our State, Southern Living, New York Times). As Tyson says in her introduction, “Every part of me is a part of Sweet Potatoes.” In Well, Shut My Mouth! she shares a culinary experience that has been a favorite of Winston-Salem natives and visitors for years. Now, patrons have the tools to re-create the Sweet Potatoes dining experience in their own homes.

Stephanie L. Tyson (right) and her partner and co-owner, Vivian Joiner (left), opened Sweet Potatoes in the Downtown Arts District of Winston-Salem in 2004. Both live in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

“Everything about this book is correct except the title. Anyone with a taste bud in their mouth should follow these recipes and open their mouth.” - Maya Angelou

From 1936 to 1938, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), a part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, hired writers, editors, and researchers to interview as many former slaves as they could find and document their lives during slavery. More than 2,000 former slaves in 17 states were interviewed. With Weren’t No Good Times, John F. Blair, Publisher, continues its Real Voices, Real History™ series with selections from 46 of the 125 interviews now archived in the Library of Congress that were earmarked as interviews with Alabama slaves. Also included is an excerpt from Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom, a memoir written by Louis Hughes. This selection reveals a different aspect of the Alabama slavery experience, because Hughes was hired out by his master to work at the Confederate salt works during the Civil War. Alabama was a frontier state and from the beginning, its economy was built on cotton and slavery. That its laws were fashioned to accommodate both becomes obvious when related through the experiences of Alabama’s slaves. A year after it obtained statehood, Alabama had a slave population of 41,879, as compared to 85,451 whites and 571 free blacks. By 1860, the slave population had swelled to 435,080, while there were 536,271 whites and 2,690 free blacks. When emancipation came to the slaves, Alabama’s slave owners lost an estimated $200 million of capital. These narratives will help readers understand slavery by hearing the voices of the people who lived it.

Horace Randall Williams describes himself as “among the last of Alabamians - black or white - who have memories of picking cotton by hand not for a few minutes to see how it felt but because I needed the few dollars I would get for a day’s hard labor under a hot sun,” an experience he says helped him recognize the cadences and dialect in the slave narratives. An Alabama native, he has researched and written extensively about civil rights, segregation, and slavery during three decades as a reporter, writer, editor, and publisher of newspapers, magazines, and books. He was the founder and, for many years, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Klanwatch Project. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of NewSouth Books in Montgomery, Alabama. He recently authored 100 Things You Need to Know about Alabama.

"For a century and a half, these stories and the truths they disclose have been hidden from view. They are far too important to stay neglected and ignored. Williams has resurrected the last generation of America’s slaves and allowed them to speak in their own voices." - Elizabeth Breau Foreword Review

Winner of the Bakwin Award. Final contest judge and award-winning author Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties) described the work as “a wonderful debut; a collection of frank, funny, and heartbreaking stories that delve into the mire of human loneliness.”

Poland’s stories usher in a world where mortal fear, the threat of violation, and the body’s looming betrayal drive us to look beyond surface appearances. In these stories, readers will find: a mosquito-borne illness invading a small southern town, forcing its inhabitants to negotiate their lust against the threats of virus-induced paralysis; a pair of newlyweds on their honeymoon at a luxury resort whose automated services quickly turn menacing; a woman whose backyard shed freezes time, forcing her to decide between her need for love and her need for escape. Poland’s stories move among richly imagined landscapes, bringing to life the deep loneliness at the heart of the modern condition and the ephemerality of the bridges we build against the dark.

A little boy named Alex learns about the wild geese who fly in the sky over the coastal waters of North Carolina. By day, his grandfather introduces him to the traditional art of carving decoys of ducks and geese in his workshop, and by night, the geese take Alex on a fantastical adventure.

A comprehensive overview in words and photographs of the famous herd of wild horses protected on one of North Carolina's barrier islands.

There is an island at the remote southern end of North Carolina’s Outer Banks where you might see wild horses playing in the surf, or grazing within view of the Cape Lookout Lighthouse, or scattering into a rare, weather-beaten maritime forest. The horse herd on Shackleford Banks has long been a subject of fascination. Today, it is both one of the wildest and most controlled animal populations on earth. An array of scientists sees to it that the horses are born, battle for social rank, forage for food, suffer the elements, and die without human interference. At the same time, to protect the island from overgrazing, these scientists practice the 21st-century paradox of “wilderness management”—a careful plan of genetic testing and immunocontraception to maintain a target population of 120 to 130 healthy horses. Mystery and controversy have always surrounded the Shackleford horses. Some experts offer evidence that they are the descendants of horses cast off foundering Spanish galleons. Others cite proof that they are of much more recent origin. Many people see them as symbols of bedrock American values like freedom and self-sufficiency. But over the years, some have argued that they pose a threat to the island’s ecology and should be banned as feral goats, sheep, and cattle were long ago. There is even disagreement over what they are. Scientists say they’re horses, but many people will forever insist they’re ponies. 

The Wild Horses of Shackleford Banks is a comprehensive overview of the famous herd—its possible origins and development, its hardiness in the face of hurricanes, its complex relationship with humans, its hard-won protection within Cape Lookout National Seashore. The book’s plentiful illustrations—both archival and contemporary—show why the Shackleford horses are so beloved among visitors to the Outer Banks.

*A portion of the proceeds from The Wild Horses of Shackleford Banks will be contributed to the Foundation for Shackleford Horses, Inc.

When Bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg arrived at Muddy Creek in January 1753, he deserved a rest. Sent by the Moravian Church to find land for a settlement, he headed west from Edenton, North Carolina, and spent a tortuous 3 ½ months locating a site, nearly dying of malaria in Granville County, nearly freezing to death near Boone. Today, most people would judge his efforts worth the hardship. He christened the tract on Muddy Creek Der Wachau—Wachovia. It was the future site of Winston-Salem. The people who followed came by an easier route. The Moravians who built Salem came from the north on the Great Wagon Road. R. J. Reynolds, the man who built Winston-Salem, came from the north, too, 120 years after the Moravians. A local writer once said the moving forces behind the hyphenated city were "the Salem conscience and the Winston purse." The Moravians established a tradition of diligence, resourcefulness, piety, and charity. The city's capitalists—chief among them the Reynolds, Hanes, and Gray families—built the greatest industrial center south of Richmond and east of Mississippi. Wachovia Bank and Trust Company grew into one of the best-run banks in the country. P. H. Hanes Knitting Company became the nation's greatest producer of knitwear. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company imported so much cigarette paper and tobacco that Winston-Salem—200 miles inland—was declared a port of entry. During its heyday, the company paid its local taxes by delivering a truckload of money to the courthouse steps—daily.

Winston-Salem: A History tells about the city's personalities: Marshall Kurfees, the persistent politician; Simon Green Atkins, who educated the African-Americans who made the city run; Z. Smith Reynolds, whose mysterious death defies explanation; F. Ross Johnson, the most hated man in town; Joe Camel, the reluctant advertising icon. It also tells about the city's coming of age. Since the traumatic buyout of RJR Nabisco in 1989—one of the largest business deals in history—Winston-Salem has started redefining itself. In its efforts to attract new companies, cultivate new leadership, and address problems like race relations, it is confronting its future head-on and pointing confidently toward a new millennium.

Frank Tursi was a newspaper journalist for almost 30 years—the last 23 at the Winston-Salem Journal where he was the environmental and special-projects reporter. He has won numerous state and national writing awards for his environmental reporting, including the Scripps-Howard National Environmental Award and The Sierra Club's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002. A graduate of East Carolina University, Tursi has contributed to such publications as USA Today and Civil War Times Illustrated. Frank is currently the Cape Lookout Coastkeeper for the N.C. Coastal Federation. He lives in Swansboro, North Carolina.

From her unique vantage point in New Orleans, Sybil Haydel Morial’s life spans one of the most critical periods in our country’s history. In this remarkable memoir, Morial chronicles her life as both witness to and catalyst for sweeping changes—desegregation, the end of Jim Crow, and the fight for voting rights. These changes transformed the nation during her lifetime. Morial’s story is welcome inspiration for the struggle for political empowerment that continues.

As Ambassador Andrew Young, a childhood friend and later Sybil’s prom date, relates in his foreword: “It is doubtful that New Orleans could have produced two mayors with the dynamic, creative, and visionary leadership of 'Dutch' and Marc Morial without a wife and mother of Sybil’s loving strength, intelligence, and moral courage. But the life she lived in the crucible times and her perception of the civil rights movement in New Orleans goes far beyond that.”

From 1971 to his retirement in 2011, Woody Durham was the “Voice of the Tar Heels,” the radio play-by-play man for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In this autobiography, Woody takes the reader on a nostalgic stroll down memory lane—from his descriptions of a sleepy Franklin Street in Chapel Hill and the days of football legend ChooChoo Justice to the enormous changes in college sports and how they are covered to his dozens of behind-the-scenes stories about the coaches and players he worked with during his tenure. An appendix offers Woody’s thoughts on every football and basketball player he covered who has an honored jersey at UNC.

Adam Lucas grew up dreaming of becoming a Carolina basketball player. A severe lack of both height and talent curtailed that dream, but he discovered another way to get as close as possible to the Tar Heels--writing about Carolina sports. He is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and Tar Heels Today and a columnist on GoHeels.com. He is author of seven books about Carolina basketball. Adam lives in Cary with his wife, Jennifer, and four children.

"Woody Durham is the epitome of a professional broadcaster, who just so happened to also love the Tar Heels as much as he did his craft. He prepared for each game as if it were the national championship and spoke about each player and coach with an enthusiasm that connected them to his listeners in a unique way. Woody helped bring the Tar Heels to life for generations of Carolina fans." Roy Williams