Blair

During the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration sent workers to interview over 2,200 former slaves about their experiences during slavery and the time immediately after the Civil War. The interviews conducted with the former Louisiana slaves often showed a different life from the slaves in neighboring states.

Louisiana was unique among the slave-holding states because of French law and influence, as demonstrated in the standards set to govern slaves in Le Code Noir. Its history was also different from many Southern states because of the prevalence of large sugar cane as well as cotton plantations, which benefited from the frequent replenishment of rich river silt deposited by Mississippi River floods. At Frogmore Plantation, which is located in Louisiana across the Mississippi River from Natchez, co-owner Lynette Tanner has spent 16 years researching and interpreting the slave narratives in order to share these stories with visitors from around the globe. The plantation offers historical re-enactments, written by Tanner, that are performed by descendants of former Natchez District slaves.

In this collection, Tanner gathered interviews conducted with former slaves who lived in Louisiana at the time of the interviews as well as narratives with those who had been enslaved in Louisiana but had moved to a different state by the 1930s. Their recollections of food, housing, clothing, weddings, and funerals, as well as treatment and relationships echo memories of an era, like no other, for which America still faces repercussions today.

Lynette Tanner and her husband own Frogmore Plantation, a working cotton plantation and gin distillery, as well as Terre Noir, a second plantation in Concordia Parish. Tanner has received numerous awards for her preservation efforts and her promotion of Louisiana tourism. Tanner was the author and narrator of “The Delta:  A Musical History” for the Smithsonian traveling exhibit which was on display in the La. Delta area.

Award-winning poet Enid Shomer’s new and selected poems explore the many facets of womanhood, from youthful desire to life’s later stages.

In Riptide, Shomer’s poems, written over the last forty years, illuminate the nature of being—whether human or kudzu—“this / headlong rush, this stammer / of green, this slow / stampede toward light.” Elegant lyrics, anchored in her beloved Florida landscape, use stunning imagery to convey Shomer’s rapturous engagement with the natural world. Longer sequences showcase narrative and formal dexterity while deftly bringing historical personae to life in poems such as “Pope Joan.” New poems powerfully examine mortality and sensuality as experienced in an aging body.

With lush music and deeply spiritual attention, Shomer’s work transforms the mundane into the numinous. Now in her early eighties, Shomer is still at the top of her form.

A middle-aged woman’s unlikely and hilarious tardy coming-of-age.

The story follows Laura in her home in Baltimore and elsewhere through her fiftieth year. Each chapter marks her encounter with a new character—a family member or two, a potential lover, complete strangers–each offering their own brand of wisdom or judgement or wacky opinion. Somehow, through these entanglements, Laura begins to gather bits and pieces of the self-knowledge she is lacking. Most, if not all, coming-of-age stories are about young people, but this is a middle-aged coming-of-age.

The story of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from Central Park Zoo and captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of followers around the world, with 32 pages of stunning color photographs.

This is a parable of freedom, wildness, and our urban ecosystems. Flaco has been dubbed “the world’s most famous bird.” From the night in February of 2023 when vandals cut a hole in his cage until his death a year later in a courtyard on the Upper West Side, his is a story full of adventure and unexpected turns.

Nature writer David Gessner chronicles the year-long odyssey of Flaco and the human drama that followed the owl who captured the imaginations of New Yorkers and people around the world. Though he’d spent his life in a cage, Flaco learned to survive in New York City by eating rats, squirrels, and birds. He was an immigrant coming from elsewhere to make it in the big city. Central Park, the island of green in an urban sea, was his new home territory.

Flaco’s urban adventure brought controversy, pitting those who felt he should be returned to the safety of the zoo against those who created the “Free Flaco” movement. The birding world was fractured over the ethics of the online sharing of his location that brought scores of enthusiasts to view him each day. And his end—with a grim necropsy revealing Flaco had suffered a viral infection from eating pigeons and had multiple rodenticides in his system—serves as a Rachel Carson-esque warning about the harm we’ve done to our urban environments, inspiring the passage of long-sought legislation protecting urban birds and regulations meant to reduce the use of rodenticides in New York City.

A former West Virginia coal miner encounters corruption and cultural upheaval working on a dam project that will submerge his town.

In the remote corner of West Virginia in the 1960s, former coal miner Lance Drennen takes a job as an overseer for the construction of an immense flood-control dam, which will drown 2800 acres of land that have been in his and other local families for generations. When Lance witnesses a terrible accident and discovers irregularities on the site that are guaranteed to line the pockets of the company and the local government, he must decide whether or not he will become a whistle-blower.

With incredible eloquence and clarity, Matthew Neill Null sets in motion the characters who will tug at either end of Lance’s life: his wife, Johnny, the adoring daughter of a hell-raising radical coal miner, who has withdrawn into her own world, and Jim Koss, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Koss is the only person who can draw Johnny out, and he becomes Lance’s confidante. But Koss has a secret history: he had been fired from the Washington agency designing the dam because of his communist sympathies.

In a most concrete and riveting narrative, Floodgate explores the social and economic upheavals of the era—labor unrest, political and corporate corruption, persecution of communists, the devastation of the environment—and their powerful impact on powerless communities. It is a story of loyalty to family and community, moral responsibility for personal choices, corporate greed and environmental destruction, and the depths and limits of love.

WINNER OF THE LEE SMITH NOVEL PRIZE

Behind the Waterline takes readers to the home of a teenager and his grandmother in a New Orleans neighborhood on the eve of Katrina, where there are few resources and little warning of what is about to happen, in this novel that mixes magical realism with reality.

When Hurricane Katrina approaches New Orleans, teenaged Eric and his grandmother and many of their neighbors decide to ride out the storm. Kionna Walker LeMalle’s masterful debut novel brings her readers, like the rising water, onto Eric’s street in the Third Ward, where stranded dogs bark for a time, where neighbors are floating on doors, and where Eric and his grandmother must take refuge in his second floor bedroom. After days of heat, dwindling supplies, and relentless rising water, neighbors begin to disappear and Eric’s grandmother, already known as an eccentric, begins to falter. It is then that Eric—in a dream, a hallucination, or something else—discovers a room beyond his closet wall, a place he has never seen. What he discovers inside will send him on a path to discover secrets to survival, bitter progress, and, ultimately, the history of his own people—those he sorely misses and those he never even knew.

2023 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Long List

2023 Book of the Year, Southern Literary Review

Named a 2023 Great Group read, Women’s National Book Association

A South Carolina family endures one life-shattering day in 1961 in a town that lies in the shadow of a nuclear bomb plant.

It’s November 1, 1961, in a small town in South Carolina, and nuclear war is coming. Ten-year-old Wilson Porter believes this with every fiber of his being. He prowls his neighborhood for Communists and studies fallout pamphlets and the habits of his father, a scientist at the nuclear plant in town.

Meanwhile, his mother Nellie covertly joins an anti-nuclear movement led by angry housewives—and his father, Dean, must decide what to do with the damning secrets he’s uncovered at the nuclear plant. When tragedy strikes, the Porter family must learn to confront their fears—of the world and of each other.

Like most progressive Southerners, Hal Crowther is decidedly angry about current social and political events, but few writers are more able than he to articulate the problems, the issues, and even the bitter humor of our present situation.

Hal Crowther is a writer who has made a long and illustrious career with sharp political and social commentary in the pages of national and regional outlets, from Time to the Atlanta Constitution to the Oxford American. In this collection, Crowther turns his attention once again to the Bible Belt, the American South, where he finds plenty of fodder for the blues: the descent from George Washington to Donald Trump, the difficulty of finding civil political discourse in a world where folks spew vitriol from behind their keyboards, Klan members marching down the street in Crowther’s hometown, the infantilization of culture (starring Mark Zuckerberg), the continued intertwining of religion and governance, and more. This essay collection features a foreword by eminent Southern writer Lee Smith, author of The Last Girls and Silver Alert.

Commentator Gene Nichol offers inspiration and ideas for blazing a progressive path forward in North Carolina, a decidedly purple state.

In the 2024 election cycle, there was good news and bad news for North Carolina progressive politics. The people elected a Democratic Governor, Lt. Governor, Attorney General, and managed to obtain a tiny toehold with the General Assembly. However, Trump prevailed in the state and nationally—leaving a large number of progressives with a lot of political energy and no place to go. So, what now? What next? Gene Nichol writes to those who are well aware of the issues that North Carolina and the country at large now face. This book tackles the all-important question of how progressives can continue to move the state forward, tackling the opposition and their own flagging spirits.

A timely and poignant poetry collection by acclaimed author and former Poet Laureate of Kentucky Silas House, including the poem read at Governor Andy Beshear’s 2023 inauguration and an interview by Barbara Kingsolver.

Silas House is known throughout the South as a quintessential person of letters—a novelist, music journalist, environmental activist, columnist, and the former Poet Laureate of Kentucky. His first full-length collection of poetry blends his Appalachian upbringing with his ongoing relation to the natural world. Poems of praise for community and the collective appear alongside others tinged with nostalgia and grief when House keenly observes the loss of rural America as he once knew it. Returning to his touchstone subjects, Silas recalls wild places, echoes stories from a lingering and living past, and explores an abiding connection to family, friends, and fellow artists.

Fifteen of North Carolina’s finest writers reimagine and reclaim the stories of the ghosts who have haunted all corners of the state.

North Carolina ain’t what it once was: forests and fields have given way to suburbs and vacation homes, textile mills to high tech, tobacco farms to tourism. That doesn’t mean, though, that the ghosts of the Old North State have gone away.

In this anthology, readers might glimpse some of the ghostly apparitions, headless fiends,  and creepy hollers they heard about around their childhood campfires. Now, fifteen of the state’s finest contemporary prose writers and poets have reimagined these stories—bringing us fresh tales that are bound to scare the living daylights out of us all over again.

Contributors include: Michele Tracy Berger on the ghosts of the Great Dismal Swamp, Wiley Cash (and his daughters) on the Maco Light, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle on the Raven Mockers, Tyree Daye on family hauntings, Jeremy B. Jones on the phantasms of Chimney Rock, Ed Southern on the Jack Tales and the Devil’s Tramping Ground, Ross White on the Little Red Man of Old Salem, and many more.

The Devil's Done Come Back reclaims these old ghost tales as living stories, told and retold to frighten and delight.

In this debut story collection, Ysabelle Cheung weaves an eerie fabulism with tales that cross continents, technology, and time.

Set in Hong Kong and America—between the present day and an uncannily altered future—this story collection warps the familiar rules of our world to ask: what does it mean to be Asian and a woman—living under the specter of state and technological surveillance—or trying to break free from it?

In the title story, a young woman of color realizes she can make her fortune by surgically selling her facial features to whiter, wealthier clients. In “Please, Get Out and Dance,” a group of rebels escapes a city that is literally disappearing around them—building by building, person by person—to migrate to a new home beneath the ocean, defying their government’s mandate. “Herbs” follows an elderly widow who, when the clones of her dead husband start to appear uninvited in her home, must grapple with her memories.

In each of these stories, Cheung tilts the world just slightly off its axis to bring together a haunting meditation on what it means to survive within our increasingly digitized and mechanized world.

A freak accident comes on the heels of a startling revelation—laying bare the foundation of a marriage, and a husband is left to grapple with the aftermath.

A poetry professor at a small college in Asheville, NC, Asa Flowers, comes home one stormy evening to find his wife Betsy inexplicably distraught. As the evening goes on, the couple end up in a heated argument that sends Asa to sleep out in their garage apartment for the first time in  twenty-five years of marriage. The next morning, he wakes to blue sky and an altered world.   

Unfolding over a few tense weeks and told from multiple points of view, this novel explores how a tragedy can assume as many shapes as the people it touches. Asa finds himself reckoning with torn feelings about his marriage and confusion about how to proceed in his complicated relationships with his adult children. As he gradually absorbs revelations—so much he didn't know or understand during his long marriage—he finds himself drawn uneasily toward a new world, one in which he must shed much of his old identity if he is to survive, and more important, rededicate himself to being a father. 

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.

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.

In the 1800s, Appalachian farmer and rogue William Prestwood kept salacious coded diaries, leaving his descendent, Jeremy Jones, to reflect on his complicated legacy.

In 1975, a man stumbled upon a box of hand-sewn notebooks in a house set for demolition in Wadesboro, North Carolina. After thumbing through the delicate pages and finding them written in code, he passed the books to a retired NSA cryptanalyst who deciphered them, uncovering the recorded life of a white Southern farmer named William Thomas Prestwood. The diaries offered a ground-level view of a 19th-century man who passed his days recording eclipses and dissecting rabbits and calculating planetary orbits and reading Goethe and sneaking into barn lofts and closets with dozens of lovers. “The reader is left,” the codebreaker wrote, “with the lasting impression that here in these pathetic little books is the very essence of Everyman’s life from the cradle to the grave.” But to author Jeremy Jones, this strange farmer was no Everyman. He was his great-great-great-great grandfather.

Cipher reanimates Prestwood, warts and all, following the author’s ancestor as he courts women and hides runaway slaves, as he fathers children with his wife and with an enslaved woman, as he mines for gold and befriends Daniel Boone’s great nephew, and as he rubs shoulders with a young Zebulon Vance and raises sons soon to die on the fields of Gettysburg. With research, Jones fills in the blank spaces of this Everyman’s life. Along the way, Jones begins tracking his own life alongside the fascinating arc of this long-ago forefather, forging an intimate relationship with a man whose own account, in Jones’s expert hand, begins to take on texture, drama, emotional resonance—even as the author uncovers curious and disturbing details about his ancestor. And thus, about his family. About himself.

Try out Prestwood's cipher at cipherthebook.com!

Young Leonard Bush buries his lost leg and saves his whole East Tennessee town in this winsome and miracle-making novel.

When twelve-year-old Leonard Bush loses his leg in a freak accident, he decides to give his leg a proper burial in the hilltop cemetery of his East Tennessee town. This event somehow sets off a chain of miraculous and catastrophic events—upending the lives of Leonard’s rigidly God-fearing mother, June; his deeply conflicted father, Emmett; and his best friend, Azalea, and her mother, Rose, who is also the town prostitute. While the local Baptist minister passes judgment on events and promises dire consequences, the people of this small community on the banks of Big Sugar move together toward awakening.

Susan Gilmore’s love of storytelling flows naturally from her Tennessee roots. She’s the daughter of a revival preacher’s son, brought up on the land and streams that populate this novel that is, as Appalachian novelist Lee Smith says, a “homespun Pilgrim’s Progress.”

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.

An inclusive LGBTQ+ travel anthology, Edge of the World explores what it means to be a queer person moving through the world.

These lively essays by luminary writers offer a queer perspective on how people experience other cultures and how other cultures receive queer people. This anthology of essays includes the perspectives of gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, and trans American authors from multiple ethnic identities, showcasing the travel writing of both established and emerging authors across a wide age spectrum to address these central questions. Contributors include Alexander Chee, Edmund White, Daisy Hernández, Putsata Reang, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Denne Michele Norris, Garrard Conley, Andrew Ellis Evans, Nicole Shawan Junior, Raluca Albu, KB Brookins, Genevieve Hudson, Zoë Sprankle, Sara Orozco, and Calvin Gimpelevich. Their essays take the reader to different areas of the world including Spain, Ukraine, Florida, New York City, Mexico, Cambodia, Russia, Senegal, Berlin, and more.

A little girl magically transforms into a mermaid and goes on an underwater adventure with her new dolphin friend.

Nell lives on the coast of North Carolina and longs to be part of the underwater world she sees off the end of the pier in front of her house. One day her wish is granted by a friendly dolphin carrying a piece of magic pirate gold, and they go off together on a magical adventure.

(Large print edition)

In rural Tennessee, two young people struggle to make a life in a town rife with poverty, guns, and alcohol.

"Holding On To Nothing is a resonant song of the South, all whiskey, bluegrass, Dolly Parton, tobacco fields, and women who know better but still fall for the lowdown men whom they know will disappoint them."—Lauren Groff, National Book Award finalist author of Fates and Furies and Florida

Lucy Kilgore has her bags packed for her escape from her rural Tennessee upbringing, but a drunken mistake forever tethers her to the town and one of its least-admired residents, Jeptha Taylor, who becomes the father of her child. Together, these two young people work to form a family, though neither has any idea how to accomplish that, and the odds are against them in a place with little to offer other than bluegrass music, tobacco fields, and a Walmart full of beer and firearms for the hunting season. Their path is harrowing, but Lucy and Jeptha are characters to love, and readers will root for their success in a novel so riveting that no one will want to turn out the light until they know whether this family will survive.

This new paperback edition features a readers' guide in the back of the book with questions for discussion and an interview with the author.

[Large print edition, Luciole font, size 16]

They used nicknames like Stovepipe, Burnt Biscuits, Skillet, Skinny, and Marble Eye. They worked for presidents of the United States, captains of industry, and the greatest golfers in the world. Their real names were Carl Jackson, Willie Perteet, and Matthew Palmer—and they witnessed every great moment, both private and public, at Augusta National beginning in the1930s—from Gene Sarazen's "shot heard 'round the world" to Jack Nicklaus winning a record five of his six Masters. Read why Nicklaus said he wouldn’t trade caddie Willie “Pete” Peterson “for a million dollars” and what Willie “Cemetery” Perteet really thought of President Eisenhower’s golf game. The Black caddies of Augusta National also endured, in their own ways, the racist social order of the sport and at the same time participated, albeit vicariously, in its many thrills. Ward Clayton documents their stories—history as compelling as the game of golf itself.

The story of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from Central Park Zoo and captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of followers around the world, with 32 pages of stunning color photographs.

This is a parable of freedom, wildness, and our urban ecosystems. Flaco has been dubbed “the world’s most famous bird.” From the night in February of 2023 when vandals cut a hole in his cage until his death a year later in a courtyard on the Upper West Side, his is a story full of adventure and unexpected turns.

Nature writer David Gessner chronicles the year-long odyssey of Flaco and the human drama that followed the owl who captured the imaginations of New Yorkers and people around the world. Though he’d spent his life in a cage, Flaco learned to survive in New York City by eating rats, squirrels, and birds. He was an immigrant coming from elsewhere to make it in the big city. Central Park, the island of green in an urban sea, was his new home territory.

Flaco’s urban adventure brought controversy, pitting those who felt he should be returned to the safety of the zoo against those who created the “Free Flaco” movement. The birding world was fractured over the ethics of the online sharing of his location that brought scores of enthusiasts to view him each day. And his end—with a grim necropsy revealing Flaco had suffered a viral infection from eating pigeons and had multiple rodenticides in his system—serves as a Rachel Carson-esque warning about the harm we’ve done to our urban environments, inspiring the passage of long-sought legislation protecting urban birds and regulations meant to reduce the use of rodenticides in New York City.

In 1994, Bob Garner began doing short features about barbecue for UNC-TV’s statewide public-television magazine program, North Carolina Now. In 1996, he published North Carolina Barbecue: Flavored by Time, taking readers on a delectable journey across the state in search of the best examples of this distinctive North Carolina delicacy. After Garner produced a one-hour television special based on his book, he quickly became known throughout North Carolina as “the barbecue man.” In 2002, he published Bob Garner’s Guide to North Carolina Barbecue, which describes the 100 best barbecue restaurants from the mountains to the sea. Bob Garner’s Book of Barbecue: North Carolina’s Favorite Food preserves the heritage and tradition of a disappearing rural lifestyle while showing how barbecue continues to evolve. Packed full of recipes for barbecue and popular side dishes (above and beyond the traditional hush puppies, slaw, and ’nana pudding); sidebars with useful tips, barbecue-related news, and features; and profiles of past and present influential pit masters and barbecue aficionados, this tome is the definitive guide to anything and everything pertaining to North Carolina’s favorite food.

Television personality, restaurant reviewer, speaker, author, pit master, and connoisseur of North Carolina barbecue, Bob Garner is the author of two previous books about barbecue. He has written extensively for Our State magazine, including “Bob Garner Eats,” a 10-part series on traditional Southern foods. He has appeared on the Food Network’s Paula’s Home Cookin’ featuring Paula Deen, and Food Nation with Bobby Flay; the Travel Channel’s Road Trip; and ABC’s Good Morning America. Garner was executive producer and host of the UNC-TV series Carolina Countryside and has been a featured speaker at the annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in New York and the Southern Foodway Alliance’s annual symposium in Oxford, Mississippi. He speaks frequently to a wide variety of audiences across North Carolina. In 2011, Garner joined with Empire Properties in Raleigh, North Carolina, to work with Ed Mitchell at The Pit to promote barbecue heritage; plans include traveling across the state to host heritage dinners and pig pickings, accompanied by live bluegrass music. Garner divides his time between Burlington and Raleigh, North Carolina.

A young girl grows up in a family uprooted by the terror of an Islamic Revolution, where her culture, her gender, and her education are in peril.

For the curious and imaginative Moji, there is no better place to grow up than the lush garden of her grandparents in Tehran. However, as she sits with her sister underneath the grapevines, listening to their grandfather recount the enchanting stories of One Thousand and One Nights, revolution is brewing in her homeland. Soon, the last monarch of Iran will leave the country, and her home and her family will never be the same.

From Moji’s house on Sun Street, readers experience the 1979 Iranian revolution through the eyes of a young girl and her family members during a time of concussive political and social change. Moji must endure the harrowing first days of the violent revolution, a fraught passage to the US where there is only hostility from her classmates during the Iranian hostage crisis, her father’s detainment by the Islamic Revolutionary Army, and finally, the massive change in the status of women in post-revolution Iran. 

Along with these seismic shifts, for Moji, there are also the universal perils of love, sexuality, and adolescence. However, since Moji’s school is centered on political indoctrination, even a young girl’s innocent crush can mean catastrophe. Is Moji able to pull through? Will her family come to her rescue? And just like Scheherazade, will the power of stories help her prevail?

An Oprah Daily pick for spring 2023

David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction Finalist

A woman growing up in a family of Russian immigrants in the 1910s seeks a thoroughly American life.

Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents, who are building a life in a Pennsylvania Appalachian town. This town, in the first decades of the 20th century, is filled with Russian transplants and a new church with a dome. Here, boys quit grade school for the coal mines and girls are married off at fourteen. The young pair up, give birth to more babies than they can feed, and make shaky starts in their new world. However, Yelena craves a different path. Will she find her happy American ending or will a dreaded Russian ending be her fate?

In this immersive novel, Zuravleff weaves Russian fairy tales and fables into a family saga within the storied American landscape. The challenges facing immigrants—and the fragility of citizenship—are just as unsettling and surprising today as they were 100 years ago. American Ending is a poignant reminder that everything that is happening in America has already happened.

River Road is a collection of narrative poems in the voice of Susan McFalls, writing from her new home in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

Wayne Caldwell, author of Cataloochee, returns to North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains to continue the story of Susan McFalls, who is left on Mount Pisgah after the death of her dear friend and neighbor Posey Green. These poems follow Susan as she moves to and renovates an old house on River Road, vividly bringing to life the wild and beautiful land and culture of the Blue Ridge and the cherished memories and new friends that continue to anchor her to this special place.

River Road is a companion to Caldwell’s first poetry collection, Woodsmoke, and while the two can stand alone, together they paint a fuller picture of friendship, loss, and the ways in which lives are shaped by the North Carolina mountains.

Straight from the roux bayou, a culinary memoir about how a centuries old Cajun and Creole secret―gumbo―has become one of the world’s most beloved dishes.

The product of a melting pot of culinary influences, gumbo reflects the diversity of the people who cooked it up: French aristocrats, West Africans in bondage, Cajun refugees, German settlers, Native Americans―all had a hand in the pot. What is it about gumbo that continues to delight and nourish so many, in America and around the world? 

A seasoned journalist, Ken Wells sleuths out the answers. His obsession goes back to his childhood in the Cajun bastion of Bayou Black, where his French-speaking mother’s gumbo often got started with a chicken chased down in the yard. In Gumbo Life: A Journey Down the Roux Bayou, Wells shares his lifelong quest to explore gumbo’s roots and mysteries. He spends time with octogenarian chefs to make a gourmet gumbo; joins a team at a highly competitive gumbo contest; visits a factory that churns out gumbo by the ton; and observes the gumbo-making rituals of an iconic New Orleans restaurant where high-end Creole cooking and Cajun cuisine first merged.

Gumbo Life, rendered in Wells’ affable prose, makes clear that gumbo is more than a dish: it’s an attitude, a way of seeing the world. This is a tasty culinary memoir―to be enjoyed like a simmering pot of gumbo.

This edition includes recipe additions as well as a story about the author’s quest for authentic Cajun Dark Roux, which involved a hunt for (thankfully scarce) bear lard.

Elaine Neil Orr, born in Nigeria to expat parents, brings us an indelible portrait of a young female artist, torn between two men and two cultures, struggling to find her passion and her purpose.

It’s 1963 and Isabel Hammond is an expat who has accompanied her agriculture aid worker husband to Nigeria, where she is hoping to find inspiration for her art and for her life. Then she meets charismatic local singer Bobby Tunde, and they share a night of passion that could upend everything. Seeking solace and distraction, she returns to her painting and her home in a rural town where she plants a lemon tree and unearths an ancient statue buried in her garden. She knows that the dancing female figure is not hers to keep, yet she is reluctant to give it up, and soon, she notices other changes that make her wonder what the dancing woman might portend.

Against the backdrop of political unrest in Nigeria, Isabel’s personal situation also becomes precarious. She finds herself in the center of a tide of suspicion, leaving her torn between the confines of her domestic life and the desire to immerse herself in her art and in the culture that surrounds her. The expat society, the ancient Nigerian culture, her beautiful family, and even the statue hidden in a back room—each trouble and beguile Isabel. Amid all of this, can she finally become who she wants to be?

WINNER OF THE LEE SMITH NOVEL PRIZE

Behind the Waterline takes readers to the home of a teenager and his grandmother in a New Orleans neighborhood on the eve of Katrina, where there are few resources and little warning of what is about to happen, in this novel that mixes magical realism with reality.

When Hurricane Katrina approaches New Orleans, teenaged Eric and his grandmother and many of their neighbors decide to ride out the storm. Kionna Walker LeMalle’s masterful debut novel brings her readers, like the rising water, onto Eric’s street in the Third Ward, where stranded dogs bark for a time, where neighbors are floating on doors, and where Eric and his grandmother must take refuge in his second floor bedroom. After days of heat, dwindling supplies, and relentless rising water, neighbors begin to disappear and Eric’s grandmother, already known as an eccentric, begins to falter. It is then that Eric—in a dream, a hallucination, or something else—discovers a room beyond his closet wall, a place he has never seen. What he discovers inside will send him on a path to discover secrets to survival, bitter progress, and, ultimately, the history of his own people—those he sorely misses and those he never even knew.

Steven Leyva’s second collection of poetry renders beauty through a Black man’s lens in a post-pandemic world populated with superheroes and characters from ancient mythology.

In The Opposite of Cruelty, Steven Leyva’s poems ask readers to see and remember beauty when the world seems to be in ruins, to notice and praise “the industrious cherry // trees budding despite a summer / full of bullets to come.” For Leyva, beauty can be found in lineage and memory, in the heroes of the comics and TV shows he watched as a boy, in taking his children to the movies to see an Afro-Latino Spider-man on the big screen, and in doing so passing down that beauty, those means of survival. In these sonnets and urban pastorals you’ll find Selena, UGK and Outkast, Storm, Static, and Batman, as well as Sisyphus, Medusa, Perseus, and Grendel. This weaving of modern culture and the ancient world calls attention to our need for stories, how heroes and villains take up residence inside us, how important it is to see one’s self represented in art and film. 

This book does not look away from life's hard and cruel moments, it simply dares to ask “What is the opposite of cruelty?” The answers: The beauty of a Black boy in his school picture, the beauty of one man’s hand touching another man’s face at the barber, the beauty of a family home or a memory of what it once was, "not a season of phantasmal peace, but what’s left / when the world’s terrors retreat.”

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.

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.

They used nicknames like Stovepipe, Burnt Biscuits, Skillet, Skinny, and Marble Eye. They worked for presidents of the United States, captains of industry, and the greatest golfers in the world. Their real names were Carl Jackson, Willie Perteet, and Matthew Palmer—and they witnessed every great moment, both private and public, at Augusta National beginning in the1930s—from Gene Sarazen's "shot heard 'round the world" to Jack Nicklaus winning a record five of his six Masters. Read why Nicklaus said he wouldn’t trade caddie Willie “Pete” Peterson “for a million dollars” and what Willie “Cemetery” Perteet really thought of President Eisenhower’s golf game. The Black caddies of Augusta National also endured, in their own ways, the racist social order of the sport and at the same time participated, albeit vicariously, in its many thrills. Ward Clayton documents their stories—history as compelling as the game of golf itself.

In rural Tennessee, two young people struggle to make a life in a town rife with poverty, guns, and alcohol.

"Holding On To Nothing is a resonant song of the South, all whiskey, bluegrass, Dolly Parton, tobacco fields, and women who know better but still fall for the lowdown men whom they know will disappoint them."—Lauren Groff, National Book Award finalist author of Fates and Furies and Florida

Lucy Kilgore has her bags packed for her escape from her rural Tennessee upbringing, but a drunken mistake forever tethers her to the town and one of its least-admired residents, Jeptha Taylor, who becomes the father of her child. Together, these two young people work to form a family, though neither has any idea how to accomplish that, and the odds are against them in a place with little to offer other than bluegrass music, tobacco fields, and a Walmart full of beer and firearms for the hunting season. Their path is harrowing, but Lucy and Jeptha are characters to love, and readers will root for their success in a novel so riveting that no one will want to turn out the light until they know whether this family will survive.

This new paperback edition features a readers' guide in the back of the book with questions for discussion and an interview with the author.

"Sherrill gives his Minotaur a ­forlorn Buster Keaton dignity. M has a silent film’s starring role in the midst of a ­country-and-western talkie. Precisely by limiting the beast to deeds, not speech, the writer eventually creates—against all odds—a living hybridized contradiction. M, if stuck in the quicksand of our ­ticky-tack present, somehow still participates in the silent scale of myth." —New York Times

The Minotaur of Greek mythology now lives in central PA in an old motel and works as Civil War re-enactor.

Sixteen years have passed since Steven Sherrill first introduced us to “M,” the selfsame Minotaur from Greek mythology, transplanted to the modern American South, in the critically acclaimed The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break. M has moved north now, from a life of kitchens and trailer parks, to that of Civil War re-enactor at a run-down living history park in the dying blue-collar rustbelt of central Pennsylvania. Though he dies now, in uniform, on a regular basis, M's world, his daily struggles, remain unchanged. Isolation. Loneliness. Other-ness. Shepherded, cared for by the Guptas (the immigrant family who runs the motel where he lives, outsiders in their own right) and tolerated by his neighbors, by most of his coworkers at Old Scald Village, but tormented by a few, M wants only to find love and understanding. The serendipitous arrival of Holly and her damaged brother, halted on their own journey of loss, stirs hope in the Minotaur’s life. As their paths overlap we find ourselves rooting for the old bull as he stumbles toward a real live human relationship.

Self-aware and intimate, Letter to My Transgender Daughter asks us all to love better, not just for the sake of Hays’s child but for children everywhere enduring injustice and prejudice just as they begin to understand themselves. Letter to My Transgender Daughter is a call to action, an ode to community, a plea for empathy, a hope for a better future. Letter to My Transgender Daughter is a love letter to a child who has always known exactly who she is—and who is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

The paperback release includes key additions to the text, including a reader's discussion guide, an interview with the author, and a list of resources and links for LGBTQ+ individuals, families, and allies.

An encyclopedic behind-the-scenes look for fans of The Andy Griffith Show.

In October 1960, The Andy Griffith Show began its eight-year reign as one of the top-ten television shows in the country. Now, more than 60 years later, the original 249 episodes still remain among the most frequently watched television shows—and its stars, Ron Howard, Don Knotts, Jim Nabors, and of course, Andy Griffith, live on in popular culture. Neal Brower, longtime superfan and show expert, has been writing and even teaching courses about The Andy Griffith Show for over thirty years. He has made it his mission to gather the lore about the show and especially about the writing and production of the scripts. Brower interviewed many of the show’s writers including Harvey Bullock, Everett Greenbaum, Sam Bobrick, and their partners and collected his findings in his 2011 book, Mayberry 101. As Gomer would say, “Well, golly!”

In this second edition of this iconic and popular book, now called The Essential Mayberry: Behind the Scenes of The Andy Griffith Show, Brower has added the scripts written by Jack Elinson and his writing partner Charles Stewart and the rewrites of producer and story consultant Aaron Ruben, as well as material from the annotated show scripts donated by Andy Griffith to UNC Libraries. “Shazam!” Fans of The Andy Griffith Show will receive a long-awaited and more complete picture of the classic television show and its creation.

North Carolina had a big, unfortunate headstart on now-common attacks on democratic institutions—the lessons learned as NC makes its way out of the chaos can benefit other states. 

Attacks from the radical right will plague the entire nation for the foreseeable future, and now is the time to seek out the causes and find the path to remedy them. In his most personal book yet, Indecent Assembly author Gene Nichol, takes on, unsurprisingly, race, religion, poverty, higher education, constitutionalism, movement politics, the meaning of North Carolina proper. He forecasts the future of democratic promise in the state, the South, and the United States. 

This book is not reportage, but rather a cri de coeur, with inspiration and aspiration for the next generation.

2023 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Long List

2023 Book of the Year, Southern Literary Review

Named a 2023 Great Group read, Women’s National Book Association

A South Carolina family endures one life-shattering day in 1961 in a town that lies in the shadow of a nuclear bomb plant.

It’s November 1, 1961, in a small town in South Carolina, and nuclear war is coming. Ten-year-old Wilson Porter believes this with every fiber of his being. He prowls his neighborhood for Communists and studies fallout pamphlets and the habits of his father, a scientist at the nuclear plant in town.

Meanwhile, his mother Nellie covertly joins an anti-nuclear movement led by angry housewives—and his father, Dean, must decide what to do with the damning secrets he’s uncovered at the nuclear plant. When tragedy strikes, the Porter family must learn to confront their fears—of the world and of each other.

An Oprah Daily pick for spring 2023

David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction Finalist

A woman growing up in a family of Russian immigrants in the 1910s seeks a thoroughly American life.

Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents, who are building a life in a Pennsylvania Appalachian town. This town, in the first decades of the 20th century, is filled with Russian transplants and a new church with a dome. Here, boys quit grade school for the coal mines and girls are married off at fourteen. The young pair up, give birth to more babies than they can feed, and make shaky starts in their new world. However, Yelena craves a different path. Will she find her happy American ending or will a dreaded Russian ending be her fate?

In this immersive novel, Zuravleff weaves Russian fairy tales and fables into a family saga within the storied American landscape. The challenges facing immigrants—and the fragility of citizenship—are just as unsettling and surprising today as they were 100 years ago. American Ending is a poignant reminder that everything that is happening in America has already happened.

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.

A parent’s love letter to a daughter who has always known exactly who she is. 

One ordinary day, a caseworker from the Department of Children and Families knocked on the Hays family's door to investigate an anonymous complaint about the upbringing of their transgender child. It was this knock, this threat, that began the family's journey out of the Bible Belt but never far from the hate and fear resting at the nation’s core. 

Self-aware and intimate, Letter to My Transgender Daughter asks us all to love better, not just for the sake of Hays’s child but for children everywhere enduring injustice and prejudice just as they begin to understand themselves. 

Letter to My Transgender Daughter is a call to action, an ode to community, a plea for empathy, a hope for a better future. Letter to My Transgender Daughter is a love letter to a child who has always known exactly who she is—and who is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

A wry and witty commentary on college sports and identity in the complicated social landscape of the South.

Ed Southern, lifelong fan of the Wake Forest University Demon Deacons, the smallest school in the NCAA's Power 5, set out to tell the story of how he got tangled, in vines of history and happenstance, with the two giants of his favorite sport: the Crimson Tide and the Clemson Tigers. He set out to tell how a North Carolina native crossed the shifty, unmarked border between Tobacco Road and the Deep South. He set out to tell how the legendary Paul “Bear” Bryant, from beyond the grave, introduced him to his wife, a Birmingham native and die-hard Alabama fan.

While he was writing that story, though, 2020 came along.

Suddenly his questions had a new and urgent focus: Why do sports mean so much that so many will play and watch them in the face of a global pandemic? How have the South’s histories shaped its fervor for college sports? How have college sports shaped how southerners construct their identities, priorities, and allegiances? Why is North Carolina passionate about college basketball when its neighbors to the South live and die by college football? Does this have anything to do with North Carolina’s reputation as the most “progressive” southern state, a state many in the Deep South don't think is “really” southern? If college sports really do mean so much in the South, then why didn’t everyone down south wear masks or recognize that Black Lives Matter, even after the coaches told us to?

Fight Songs explores the connections and contradictions between the teams we root for and the places we plant our roots; between the virtues that sports are supposed to teach and the cutthroat business they've become; between the hopes of fans and the demands of the past, present, and future.

This book is the first in a series of small, richly illustrated books about North Carolina history through the decades. Originally published as hugely popular serialized articles for Our State magazine, this book chronicles events in North Carolina in the 1940s—a decade which began with the state gearing up for war just as the last formerly enslaved person passed away. The volume is not a textbook overview of the state’s history. Rather, each chapter focuses on a lively and illuminating set of events in the era, such as the music explosion around John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk in the eastern part of the state and Earl Scruggs and traditional string band music in the west, the polio pandemic, shipbuilding in wartime, a harsh era of hurricanes and floods, as well as tobacco as the king of the farming and industrial sectors.

The book contains color vintage photographs and illustrations. The author, writer, professor, and musician, Philip Gerard, has published widely, including an iconic novel about the Wilmington coup of 1898, Cape Fear Rising, and is beloved in North Carolina, especially among Our State readers.

Después de meses de usar mascarilla, lavarse las manos y practicar distanciamiento social, los niños tienen otra forma de ayudar durante la pandemia de Covid-19: vacunarse. Con apenas un pequeño pinchazo, los niños se protegen contra el virus y así ayudan a proteger a su familia, sus amigos y su comunidad. Este libro explica a los chicos en lenguaje claro cómo las vacunas nos ayudarán a eliminar la Covid-19 y cuál es el papel de los niños en esa misión.

A history of the rich culture of the Gullah people–a story of upheaval, endurance, and survival in the Lowcountry of the American South.

Gullah Culture in America chronicles the history and culture of the Gullah people, African Americans who live in the Lowcountry region of the American South. This book, written for the general public, chronicles the arrival of enslaved West Africans to the sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia; the melding of their African cultures, which created distinct creole language, cuisine, traditions, and arts; and the establishment of the Penn School, dedicated to education and support of the Gullah freedmen following the Civil War. 

Original author Wilbur Cross, writing in 2008, describes the ongoing Gullah story: the preservation of the culture sheltered in a rural setting, the continued influence of the Penn School (now called the Penn Center) in preserving and documenting the Gullah Geechee cultures. Today, more than 300,000 Gullah people live in the remote areas of the sea islands of St. Helena, Edisto, Coosay, Ossabaw, Sapelo, Daufuskie, and Cumberland, their way of life endangered by overdevelopment in an increasingly popular tourist destination. 

For the second edition of this popular book, Eric Crawford, Gullah Geechee scholar, has updated the text with new information and a fresh perspective on the Gullah Geechee culture.

Winner of the 2020 Emory Global Health Institute Competition.

Here’s a book that provides children honest yet positive information about Coronavirus (Covid-19). COVID-19 HELPERS gives kids the facts of the pandemic, but also offers hope. Mr. Rogers said that when things get scary, “Look for the helpers.” Likewise, this story reassures children and parents that many people from all walks of life—including kids themselves—are helping to fight the virus. In COVID-19 HELPERS, Kary Lee’s beautiful illustrations and Beth Bacon’s clear, comforting words help children understand that though they may feel isolated in these times, they are not alone.

In fact, by staying at home during the quarantine, kids are playing an important role in helping to reduce the coronavirus infection rate. This book helps parents, teachers, and librarians discuss many issues of the global pandemic, including:

• School closures, park closures, theater closures due to quarantine or shelter-in-place policies
• Social distancing
• Wearing masks during the pandemic
• Feelings of helplessness, isolation, and boredom caused by social distancing policies
• Medical research to end the pandemic
• Cancelled sporting events, cancelled birthday parties

Plus extra pages explaining:

Even during the global pandemic, communities everywhere have many helpers fighting this new disease, including doctors, nurses, researchers, scientists, farmers, truck drivers, garbage collectors, shopkeepers, postal workers, government leaders, reporters, and even kids living in shelter-in-place quarantines.

This book is also available in a Spanish language edition. It was selected by the Emory Global health Institute as the winner of an international competition for a children’s book coping about COVID from over 250 entries.

This book is the second in a series of small, richly illustrated books about North Carolina history through the decades. Originally published as hugely popular serialized articles for Our State magazine, this book chronicles events in North Carolina in the 1950s—a decade which began with a postwar boom in transportation, travel, and progress while some North Carolinians also began to speak out for their rightful piece of prosperity and freedom. The volume is not a textbook overview of the state’s history. Rather, each chapter focuses on a lively and illuminating set of events in the era such as the fight for recognition by the Lumbee Tribe, the opening of an art museum with a collection owned by the people of North Carolina, the formation of Research Triangle Park, and the birth of the civil rights era at a small lunch counter.

The book contains color vintage photographs and illustrations. The author—writer, professor, and musician, Philip Gerard—has published widely, including an iconic novel about the Wilmington coup of 1898, Cape Fear Rising, and is beloved in North Carolina, especially among Our State readers.

Kids can do their part to help heal the world and stop the pandemic by getting a COVID vaccine.

After months of wearing masks, washing hands, and social distancing, kids have another way to help during the COVID-19 pandemic: they need to get a vaccine. With one little prick, kids can get protection from the virus and, in turn, help protect their family, their friends, and their community. In straightforward language, this book explains to kids how vaccines will help us rid the world of COVID-19 and how they have a role to play in that mission.

The expansion of Marvel and DC Comics’ characters such as Black Panther, Luke Cage, and Black Lightning in film and on television has created a proliferation of poetry in this genre—receiving wide literary and popular attention.

This groundbreaking collection highlights work from poets who have written verse within this growing tradition, including Terrance Hayes, Lucille Clifton, Gil Scott-Heron, A. Van Jordan, Glenis Redmond, Tracy K. Smith, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, Joshua Bennett, Douglas Kearney, Tara Betts, Frank X Walker, Tyree Daye, and others. 

In addition, the anthology will also feature the work of artists such as John Jennings and Najee Dorsey, showcasing their interpretations of superheroes, Black comic characters, Afrofuturistic images from the African diaspora.

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.

Winner of the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award for poetry

Winner of the Wren Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón, Caitlin Scarano’s collection wrestles with family violence, escaping home, unraveling relationships, and the complexity of sexuality. 

The Necessity of Wildfire begins, “To not harm / each other is not enough. I want to love you / so much that you have no before.” These poems chase a singular, thorny question: how does where and who we came from shape who and how we love? Judge Ada Limón says the resulting collection is “hungry, clear-eyed, tough, and generous.”

Scarano’s imagination is galvanized by the South where she grew up and by the Pacific Northwest where she now resides—floods and wildfires, the Salish Sea and the North Cascades, and the humans and animals whose lives intersect and collide there. In this collection, Scarano reckons with a legacy of violence on both sides of their family, the death of their estranged father, the unraveling of long-term relationships, the complexity of their sexuality, and the decision not to have children. With fierce lyricality, these poems—“stories without monsters, / stories without morals”—resist both redemption and blame, yet call in mercy.

Ganador del Concurso de libros infantiles de Emory Global Health Institute de 2020.

¿Busca formas honestas pero positivas de hablar con los niños sobre el Coronavirus-19 (Covid-19)? AYUDANTES EN COVID-19 describe la pandemia de forma objetiva pero optimista. Este cuento asegura a los niños y sus padres que muchas personas, incluidos los niños mismos, están ayudando a combatir el virus. En AYUDANTES EN COVID-19, las bellas y coloridas ilustraciones de Kary Lee y las claras y reconfortantes palabras de Beth Bacon explican a los niños que, aunque se sientan asilados e indefensos, no están solos.

De hecho, al quedarse en casa durante la cuarentena, desempeñan un papel importante para ayudar a bajar la tasa de infección de coronavirus. Este libro ayuda a padres, maestros y bibliotecarios a conversar sobre muchos temas de la pandemia, como por ejemplo:

• El cierre de escuelas, parques y teatros debido a reglas de cuarentena o resguardo en el lugar
• Distanciamiento social
• Uso de mascarillas durante la pandemia
• Sentimientos de impotencia, aislamiento y aburrimiento causados por las reglas de distanciamiento social
• Investigación médica para poner fin a la pandemia
• Cancelación de eventos deportivos y fiestas de cumpleaños

Además, las páginas adicionales explican:

• Datos sobre el virus Covid-19
• Qué pueden hacer los niños para no adquirir Covid-19

Aun durante la pandemia, las comunidades de todo el mundo cuentan con muchos ayudantes para luchar contra esta nueva enfermedad: médicos, enfermeros, investigadores, científicos, agricultores, camioneros, recolectores de basura, comerciantes, empleados de correo, líderes gubernamentales, periodistas, y hasta niños en cuarentena.

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.

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.

Kids can do their part to help heal the world and stop the pandemic by getting a COVID vaccine.

After months of wearing masks, washing hands, and social distancing, kids have another way to help during the COVID-19 pandemic: they need to get a vaccine. With one little prick, kids can get protection from the virus and, in turn, help protect their family, their friends, and their community. In straightforward language, this book explains to kids how vaccines will help us rid the world of COVID-19 and how they have a role to play in that mission.

Coralee Harper struggles for justice for her dead brother and her own sanity in Depression-era rural Arkansas.

In 1926 in rural Green County, Arkansas, where cotton and poverty reign, young Coralee Harper hopes for a family and a place in her community, but when her brother Buddy is killed by a powerful sheriff, she can’t recover from his death or the injustice of his loss. When she begins to spot her dead brother around town, she wonders—is she clairvoyant, mistaken, or is she losing her mind?

What Coralee can’t fathom is that there are forces at work that threaten her and the very fabric of the town: Leroy Harrison, a newly minted, ambitious lawyer who makes a horrible mistake, landing him a judgeship and a guilty conscience for life; an evangelical preacher and his flock of snake-handling parishioners; the women of the town who, along with Coralee’s own mother, make up their own kind of jury for Coralee’s behavior; Sheriff Wiley Slocum who rules the entire field, harboring dark secrets of his own; and finally, Coralee’s husband Earl, who tries to balance his work at the cotton gin with his fight for family and Coralee’s life.

When Coralee ends up in a sanity hearing before Judge Leroy Harrison, the judge must decide both Coralee’s fate and his own. The chain of events following his decision draws him more deeply into the sheriff’s far-reaching sphere of influence, and reveals the destructive nature of power, even—and especially—his own.

At Gettysburg, PA, during three days of July 1863, 160,000 men fought one of the most fierce and storied battles of the US Civil War.

Nearly one in three of those men ended up a casualty of that battle, and when the two armies departed a few days later, 21,000 wounded remained. This book is the story of how those soldiers were cared for in a town of 2,500 people. Historian and author of several other guides to Gettysburg, 

James Gindlesperger provides a context for the medical and organizational constraints of the era and then provides details about the aid stations and field hospitals created in the aftermath of the battle. Filled with historical and contemporary photos, as well as stories about the soldiers and their healers, this book is a detailed guide for visitors to the site as well as others interested in American Civil War history.

A hiking guide and photography book on North Carolina’s lookout towers.

In the 1920s and 1930s, forestry organizations built dozens of lookout structures in Western North Carolina as the backbone of a firefighting system. Many of these lookouts survive in North Carolina today— they represent some of the best destinations for hikers who want to see the incredible vistas of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Part hiking guide and part photography collection, this book contains wonderful stories about the history and folklore of the lookouts and their fire lookout inhabitants, a detailed guide of hikes to each, and details about the views at the top—all provided by a local, long-term land preservationist and lookout fanatic, Peter J. Barr. Barr’s text is augmented by the amazing full-color photographs of well-known nature photographer Kevin Adams (North Carolina Waterfalls).

In World War II-era rural Kentucky, twenty-two-year-old Easter and Anneth, her teenaged sister, lose their parents young, so they must raise each other. Easter finds her life in the Pentecostal Holiness church and its music, while Anneth dances and drinks in less-than-holy honky-tonks. Will the differences in their young lives and in their very natures tear them apart or will the bond of the sisters prevail? In lucid prose with an ear for the voice of the sisters’ time and place, Silas House brings readers a rich and moving story of coal country.

This novel was named The Appalachian Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize.

Blair brings this novel into a beautiful new paperback edition, along with two other Silas House novels, Clay’s Quilt and A Parchment of Leaves. The three novels, which share a common setting and some characters, are companion novels. They may be read individually, in any order, but collectively, they form a rich tableau of life in rural mountain Kentucky in the last century.

Ganador del Concurso de libros infantiles de Emory Global Health Institute de 2020.

¿Busca formas honestas pero positivas de hablar con los niños sobre el Coronavirus-19 (Covid-19)? AYUDANTES EN COVID-19 describe la pandemia de forma objetiva pero optimista. Este cuento asegura a los niños y sus padres que muchas personas, incluidos los niños mismos, están ayudando a combatir el virus. En AYUDANTES EN COVID-19, las bellas y coloridas ilustraciones de Kary Lee y las claras y reconfortantes palabras de Beth Bacon explican a los niños que, aunque se sientan asilados e indefensos, no están solos.

De hecho, al quedarse en casa durante la cuarentena, desempeñan un papel importante para ayudar a bajar la tasa de infección de coronavirus. Este libro ayuda a padres, maestros y bibliotecarios a conversar sobre muchos temas de la pandemia, como por ejemplo:

• El cierre de escuelas, parques y teatros debido a reglas de cuarentena o resguardo en el lugar
• Distanciamiento social
• Uso de mascarillas durante la pandemia
• Sentimientos de impotencia, aislamiento y aburrimiento causados por las reglas de distanciamiento social
• Investigación médica para poner fin a la pandemia
• Cancelación de eventos deportivos y fiestas de cumpleaños

Además, las páginas adicionales explican:

• Datos sobre el virus Covid-19
• Qué pueden hacer los niños para no adquirir Covid-19

Aun durante la pandemia, las comunidades de todo el mundo cuentan con muchos ayudantes para luchar contra esta nueva enfermedad: médicos, enfermeros, investigadores, científicos, agricultores, camioneros, recolectores de basura, comerciantes, empleados de correo, líderes gubernamentales, periodistas, y hasta niños en cuarentena.

Winner of the 2020 Emory Global Health Institute Competition.

Here’s a book that provides children honest yet positive information about Coronavirus (Covid-19). COVID-19 HELPERS gives kids the facts of the pandemic, but also offers hope. Mr. Rogers said that when things get scary, “Look for the helpers.” Likewise, this story reassures children and parents that many people from all walks of life—including kids themselves—are helping to fight the virus. In COVID-19 HELPERS, Kary Lee’s beautiful illustrations and Beth Bacon’s clear, comforting words help children understand that though they may feel isolated in these times, they are not alone.

In fact, by staying at home during the quarantine, kids are playing an important role in helping to reduce the coronavirus infection rate. This book helps parents, teachers, and librarians discuss many issues of the global pandemic, including:

• School closures, park closures, theater closures due to quarantine or shelter-in-place policies
• Social distancing
• Wearing masks during the pandemic
• Feelings of helplessness, isolation, and boredom caused by social distancing policies
• Medical research to end the pandemic
• Cancelled sporting events, cancelled birthday parties

Plus extra pages explaining:

Even during the global pandemic, communities everywhere have many helpers fighting this new disease, including doctors, nurses, researchers, scientists, farmers, truck drivers, garbage collectors, shopkeepers, postal workers, government leaders, reporters, and even kids living in shelter-in-place quarantines.

This book is also available in a Spanish language edition. It was selected by the Emory Global health Institute as the winner of an international competition for a children’s book coping about COVID from over 250 entries.

In this nationally bestselling novel, A Parchment of Leaves, Silas House produced an iconic story of 1900s rural mountain Kentucky that remains a favorite of many of his fans.

On his way to find work in the Redbud Camp, Saul Sullivan encounters a Cherokee girl who is said to possess a beauty that brings death to the men who see her. Saul, however, is irrevocably drawn to Vine the moment he lays eye on her and believes they are meant to be married, over the objections of her mother and his. Despite her misgivings, Saul’s mother, Esme, and his brother Aaron take to Vine from the moment she comes to God’s Creek. In fact, Vine realizes from the start that Aaron’s interest in her is far more than brotherly. When Saul must leave Vine behind for a year of work, troubling and violent events follow his departure, and Vine’s spirit and her love are put to the ultimate test.

This novel was the Winner of the Award for Special Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a Finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize.

Blair brings this novel into a beautiful new paperback edition, along with two other Silas House novels, Clay’s Quilt and The Coal Tattoo. The three novels, which share a common setting and some characters, are companion novels. They may be read individually, in any order, but collectively, they form a rich tableau of life in rural mountain Kentucky in the last century.

A hiking guide and photography book on North Carolina’s lookout towers.

In the 1920s and 1930s, forestry organizations built dozens of lookout structures in Western North Carolina as the backbone of a firefighting system. Many of these lookouts survive in North Carolina today— they represent some of the best destinations for hikers who want to see the incredible vistas of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Part hiking guide and part photography collection, this book contains wonderful stories about the history and folklore of the lookouts and their fire lookout inhabitants, a detailed guide of hikes to each, and details about the views at the top—all provided by a local, long-term land preservationist and lookout fanatic, Peter J. Barr. Barr’s text is augmented by the amazing full-color photographs of well-known nature photographer Kevin Adams (North Carolina Waterfalls).

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.

“Kim Powers's haunting and spellbinding novel Rules for Being Dead reads like an intoxicating blend of the best of Shirley Jackson, Alice Sebold and Fannie Flagg." —STARRED Review, Shelf Awareness

It's the late 1960s in McKinney, Texas. At the downtown theater and the local drive-in, movies—James Bond, My Fair Lady, Alfie, and Dr. Zhivago—feed the dreams and obsessions of a ten-year-old Clarke who loves Audrey, Elvis, his family, and the handsome boy in the projector booth. Then Clarke loses his beloved mother, and no one will tell him how she died. No one will tell her either. She is floating above the trees and movie screens of McKinney, trapped between life and death, searching for a glimpse of her final moments on this earth. Clarke must find the shattering truth, which haunts this darkly humorous and incredibly moving novel.

In his New York Times bestselling debut novel, Silas House introduced himself as an important voice for Appalachia, and indeed, for the entire rural South. In Clay’s Quilt, now a touchstone for his many fans, House takes us to Free Creek, Kentucky, where a motherless young man forges his path to adulthood, surrounded by ancient mountains and his blood relatives and adopted kin: his Aunt Easter tied to her faith and foreboding nature; his Uncle Paul, the quilter; the wild girls Evangeline and Alma; and a fiddler whose music calls to Clay’s heart. As he struggles to stitch up the void created by his mother’s death, Clay pieces together his own life’s quilt, all masterfully wrought by House.

Blair brings this novel into a beautiful new paperback edition, along with two other Silas House novels, A Parchment of Leaves and The Coal Tattoo. The three novels, which share a common setting and some characters, are companion novels. They may be read individually, in any order, but collectively, they form a rich tableau of life in rural mountain Kentucky in the last century.

Lee Smith brings her masterful storytelling magic to this jewel of a novella that follows Jenny, an adventurous thirteen-year-old, down to Key West for a patched-up family vacation following the discovery of her father’s illicit affair.

Available for the first time as a stand-alone novella, this book centers on the Blue Marlin Motel in 1959, where Jenny, her beautiful socialite mother, and chastened father share their sunny days with movie stars who are in town to make the movie Operation Petticoat.

Jenny is precocious and a bit of a sleuth, so her innocent “observations” to uncover the secrets of movie stars also end up revealing the secrets of her own family. Jenny confronts the frailty of family life while also vying for the attention of actor Tony Curtis and even a role in his movie. Smith delivers humor and honesty to her flawed characters with genuine Southern dignity.

Wilhelmina, the world’s most beloved pet cat, is missing. Or is she? 

This boldly illustrated adventure features one very worried girl, two frayed dads, a backyard of perils, and sneaky references to great works of art. Based on a true story, a real family, and a real cat named Wilhelmina.

A poetry collection by internationally acclaimed poet Lenard D. Moore focusing on jazz music as an experience and an inspiration.

In The Geography of Jazz, Moore celebrates jazz music and jazz musicians. Some of the poems address specific events. Others honor individual artists. Many do both. While the poems may not initially signal the rhythms of jazz in their presentation on the page, they convey jazz rhythms through Moore’s deft handling of the poetic line and his use of formal techniques including but not limited to assonance, onomatopoeia, and repetition. This collection also includes a new poetic form, jazzku, an innovation that recalls Japanese haiku and tanka.

WINNER of the LEE SMITH NOVEL PRIZE

“This sun-and-salt-kissed coming-of-age story reads like a wry, honest chat with a close friend.” —Jaclyn Fulwood, Shelf Awareness

Evie Austin, native of Hatteras Island, North Carolina and baddest girl on the planet, has not lived her life in a straight line. There have been several detours—career snafus, bad romantic choices, a loved but unplanned child—not to mention her ill-advised lifelong obsession with boxer Mike Tyson. Evie is not plucky, but when life’s changes smash over her like the rough surf of the local shoreline, she muddles through—until that moment of loss and longing when muddling will no longer suffice. This is the story of what the baddest girl on the planet must find in herself when a bag of pastries, a new lover, or quick trip to Vegas won’t fix anything, and when something more than casual haplessness is required. The Baddest Girl on the Planet is inventive, sharp, witty, and poignant. Readers will want to jump in and advise this baddest girl on the planet—or at least just give her a shake or a hug—at every fascinating turn.

WINNER of the LEE SMITH NOVEL PRIZE

“This sun-and-salt-kissed coming-of-age story reads like a wry, honest chat with a close friend.” —Jaclyn Fulwood, Shelf Awareness

Evie Austin, native of Hatteras Island, North Carolina and baddest girl on the planet, has not lived her life in a straight line. There have been several detours—career snafus, bad romantic choices, a loved but unplanned child—not to mention her ill-advised lifelong obsession with boxer Mike Tyson. Evie is not plucky, but when life’s changes smash over her like the rough surf of the local shoreline, she muddles through—until that moment of loss and longing when muddling will no longer suffice. This is the story of what the baddest girl on the planet must find in herself when a bag of pastries, a new lover, or quick trip to Vegas won’t fix anything, and when something more than casual haplessness is required. The Baddest Girl on the Planet is inventive, sharp, witty, and poignant. Readers will want to jump in and advise this baddest girl on the planet—or at least just give her a shake or a hug—at every fascinating turn.

"The war is still raging. And [Gene Nichol]’s still fighting." —John Grisham

North Carolina has, since 2013, undergone a greater political sea change than any other state. For the first time, seven years ago, state government became completely captured by a radicalized and aggressive Republican leadership determined to produce the most ultra-conservative political regime in the nation. In a remarkably brief time span, Republican lawmakers have moved successfully toward that goal. The New York Times refers to the project as “North Carolina’s pioneering work in bigotry.” Other states have begun to follow what they expressly deemed the “North Carolina playbook.”

Indecent Assembly lays out in detail, and with no small dose of passion, the agenda, purposes, impacts, and transgressions of the Republican North Carolina General Assembly since it came to dominate life in the Tar Heel State. Nichol outlines, without holding punches, the stoutest war waged against people of color and low-income citizens seen in America for a half-century. All-white Republican caucuses, dominating both houses of the General Assembly, have behaved essentially like a White People’s Party, without the nomenclature. Bold steps have also been taken to diminish the equal dignity of women and an internationally famed crusade against LGBTQ+ Tar Heels has capped off what has become a state-based battle against the Fourteenth Amendment. But the Republican General Assembly has not stopped with substantive legal changes. It has attacked the fundaments of American constitutional government. In 2019, the state of North Carolina, in short, is involved in a brutal battle for its own decency. If the contest is lost here, other states will likely abandon defining cornerstones of American liberty and equality as well. North Carolina today is not presented with the mere give and take of normal politics. It struggles over its meaning as a commonwealth and its future as a democracy.

The book is introduced with a foreword by Rev. William Barber, leader of the Moral Monday Movement in North Carolina and the Poor People’s Campaign nationally, and Timothy Tyson, Duke University civil rights historian, activist, and author of The Blood of Emmett Till and Blood Done Sign My Name.

“Kim Powers's haunting and spellbinding novel Rules for Being Dead reads like an intoxicating blend of the best of Shirley Jackson, Alice Sebold and Fannie Flagg." —STARRED Review, Shelf Awareness

It's the late 1960s in McKinney, Texas. At the downtown theater and the local drive-in, movies—James Bond, My Fair Lady, Alfie, and Dr. Zhivago—feed the dreams and obsessions of a ten-year-old Clarke who loves Audrey, Elvis, his family, and the handsome boy in the projector booth. Then Clarke loses his beloved mother, and no one will tell him how she died. No one will tell her either. She is floating above the trees and movie screens of McKinney, trapped between life and death, searching for a glimpse of her final moments on this earth. Clarke must find the shattering truth, which haunts this darkly humorous and incredibly moving novel.

Piedmont Phantoms collects ghost stories from the populous central region of North Carolina as part of the Haunted North Carolina series. This book includes stories told around campfires, in grandma’s attic, and on nighttime drives on the backroads of the Piedmont. There is a story for each county in the Piedmont, forty in all, including tales of ghosts, witches, demons, spook lights, unidentified flying objects, unexplained phenomena, and more.

“Capitol Haunts,” the Wake County story, tells of strange doings at the State Capitol—an unoccupied elevator moving from floor to floor, an unseen hand touching a security guard, the sounds of books falling off shelves and barrels rolling down stairs. “Ghostly Legacy of the Swamp Fox,” the Robeson County story, introduces the spirits of the traitor who betrayed Revolutionary War general Francis Marion and the Highland Scot girl who made him do it. “The Hunter at the Zoo,” the Randolph County story, describes the ghost of the Confederate recruiter who once hunted human prey at what is now North Carolina Zoological Park.

Piedmont Phantoms contains a new foreword by Scott Mason, WRAL’s “Tar Heel Traveler” and author of three North Carolina guidebooks. Other books in the Haunted North Carolina series feature tales of the mountains, Haints of the Hills, and tales of the coast, Seaside Spectres.

"Holding On To Nothing is a resonant song of the South, all whiskey, bluegrass, Dolly Parton, tobacco fields, and women who know better but still fall for the lowdown men whom they know will disappoint them." —Lauren Groff, National Book Award finalist author of Fates and Furies and Florida

Lucy Kilgore has her bags packed for her escape from her rural Tennessee upbringing, but a drunken mistake forever tethers her to the town and one of its least-admired residents, Jeptha Taylor, who becomes the father of her child. Together, these two young people work to form a family, though neither has any idea how to accomplish that, and the odds are against them in a place with little to offer other than bluegrass music, tobacco fields, and a Walmart full of beer and firearms for the hunting season. Their path is harrowing, but Lucy and Jeptha are characters to love, and readers will root for their success in a novel so riveting that no one will want to turn out the light until they know whether this family will survive.
In luminous prose, debut novelist Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne brings us a present-day Appalachian story in the tradition of Lee Smith, Silas House, and Ron Rash, cast without sentiment or cliché, but with a genuine and profound understanding of the place and its people.

They were bold, arrogant, brutal. They strode the rolling deck of a ship more easily than the tame streets of a town. They were wealthy—some beyond the wildest dreams of the governors and kings who first supported them, then pursued them. They were the pirates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they terrorized shipping lanes and coastal villages around the world.

The pirates in this book sailed far and wide, but all made their mark on the Atlantic coast. Some made their home there, such as the notorious Blackbeard, who anchored his ship off Ocracoke Island and lived for a time in Bath, North Carolina. Others put ashore just long enough to change seafaring history, such as the rakish "Calico Jack" Rackham, whose chance meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, with a spirited redheaded girl would give the world another legendary pirate—the beautiful Anne Bonny. Though popular culture has created an image of a "typical" pirate, plying his trade with dash and vigor beneath his skull-and-crossbones flag, in reality these men—and women—were of character and background as varied as the flags they flew.

In this collection of pirate tales, you will meet scions of colonial aristocrats like Rhode Island's Thomas Tew and the dandified Stede Bonnet of Barbados; off-spring of unassuming farm families like Pennsylvanian Rachel Wall and Massachusetts' Charles Gibbs; and those like Edward Low of England, who escaped lives of desperate poverty and squalor by putting to sea. What these men and women had in common was a yearning for excitement, a love for the seafaring life, and a taste for the wealth that piracy could provide. Romance, danger, suspense, adventure—all this and more awaits you on board the tall ships with the pirates of the Atlantic coast. Join them now for a voyage you will never forget.

Nancy Roberts, a popular Southern writer and storyteller, was the acclaimed, award-winning author of more than twenty-five books where she blended suspense, mystery, and history with a talent for finding true stories of the supernatural. She was aptly proclaimed the "Custodian of the Twilight Zone" by Southern Living magazine, and was frequently introduced as the "First Lady of Folklore." She was a featured speaker or teller at several locations: the North Carolina Museum of History; Thalian Hall in Wilmington, North Carolina; Kiawah Island Resort, South Carolina; University of Illinois at De Kalb; and many schools and libraries throughout the Southeast. She passed away in the fall of 2008.

A Korean woman in rural Kentucky clings to the love found in her new marriage as the mountain above her washes away.
A dutiful daughter struggles to help her father navigate their shared grief—and the sudden release of dangerous, exotic animals.
A new father driven by his pride confronts Japanese soldiers in a harrowing raid on his home.
In his debut collection, Michael Croley takes us from the Appalachian regions of rural Kentucky and Ohio to a village in South Korea in thirteen engaging stories in which characters find themselves, wherever they are, in states of displacement. In these settings, Croley guides his characters to some semblance of home, where they circle each other's pain, struggle to find belonging, and make sense of the mistakes and bad breaks that have brought them there. Croley uses his absorbing prose to uncover his characters’ hidden disquiet and to bring us a remarkable and unique collection that expands the scope of modern American literature.

Little Turkle hatches into a world full of wonder on a barrier island off the Atlantic Coast where some people call turtles "turkles." 

He must journey from his nest in the warm beach sand to the cool, foaming waters of the ocean. When Little Turkle runs into trouble, a special friend helps him on his way to the waves.

Haints of the Hills collects ghost stories from North Carolina’s mountainous west as part of the Haunted North Carolina series. This book includes stories told around campfires, in grandma’s attic, and on nighttime drives on the curvy roads of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There is a story for each county in western North Carolina, twenty-seven in all, among them tales of ghosts, witches, demons, spook lights, unidentified flying objects, unexplained phenomena, and more.

Readers will be chilled to learn of the red-and-white-striped monstrosity that may still inhabit the Valley River at the site the Indians called the “Leech Place,” as told in the Cherokee County story, “The Giant Bloodsucker.” They’ll be warmed by the Christ-like stranger who came to Bat Cave to repair a rift between neighbors, then vanished as mysteriously as he arrived, as revealed in the Henderson County story, “The Carpenter.” They’ll want to travel the lonely stretch of road in Avery County where locals have witnessed the spirit of Captain Robert Sevier, the seven-foot-tall hero of the American Revolution, as laid out in “The Long Trek Home.”

Haints of the Hills contains a new foreword by Scott Mason, WRAL’s “Tar Heel Traveler” and author of three North Carolina guidebooks. Other books in the Haunted North Carolina series feature tales of the coast, Seaside Spectres, and tales of the state’s central region, Piedmont Phantoms.

Seaside Spectres collects ghost stories from the coastal region of North Carolina as part of the Haunted North Carolina series. 

This book includes stories told around beach campfires, in grandma’s attic, and on nighttime drives to the coast. There are thirty-three stories in all, one for each coastal county, including tales of ghosts, witches, demons, spook lights, unidentified flying objects, unexplained phenomena, and more.

In “The Cursed Town,” an eighteenth-century preacher curses the town of Bath—a curse from which the town never recovered. “Terrors of the Swamp” details the unexplained happenings in the Great Dismal Swamp—mysterious lights, a haunting from the American Revolution, and a creature called the Dismal Swamp Freak. In “The Fraternity of Death,” readers meet the nineteenth-century cult whose members mocked the Last Supper and died under mysterious circumstances soon afterward, inspiring a story by Robert Louis Stephenson.

Seaside Spectres contains a new foreword by Scott Mason, WRAL’s "Tar Heel Traveler" and author of three North Carolina guidebooks. Other books in the Haunted North Carolina series feature tales of the mountains, Haints of the Hills, and tales of the state’s central region, Piedmont Phantoms.

The Gullah culture, though borne of isolation and slavery, thrived on the US East Coast sea islands from pre-Civil War times until today, and nowhere more prominently than on Hilton Head Island, SC. 

On this small barrier island descendants of the first generations of Gullah people continue to preserve Gullah language, customs, arts, and cuisine. The three authors of Gullah Days: Hilton Head Islanders Before the Bridge 1861-1956 are among those descendants, and in this book, they chronicle the amazing history of their secluded community from the Civil War through the 1950s, when real estate development connected Hilton Head Island to the mainland with a bridge.

The history of these Gullah islanders, little celebrated until now, is an amazing American story. Hilton Head Island was one of the first areas liberated by Union troops after Fort Sumter. With plantation owners absent, the society of formerly enslaved Gullah people embarked on the activities of freedom: enlisting in fighting for the Union army; creating the first black-governed community in the South, complete with a police force; and, when formal emancipation arrived, running for office, campaigning, and voting.

This book illustrates in vivid detail the story of that vibrant post-Civil War era and the tangled perils of Reconstruction that followed, along with all of the progress and setbacks of African Americans in the South over 150 years via the lives of Gullah Hilton Head Islanders. Authors rely on the historical records and amazing first-person accounts they have gathered from their relatives and other community members to tell this riveting story.

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.