Bonnie E. Cone Professor in Civic Engagement Professor of English, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

AUTHOR

Mark West

Waterbean Poetry Night with Diana (Dede) Mitchell and Caroline Kane Kenna

July 11, 2026 by Mark West

When I was an undergraduate student back in the early 1970s, I took an interest in the poets of the Beat Generation, and that’s when I first learned about the connection between coffeehouses and the Beat poets. In the 1950s and early ‘60s, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and other Beat poets often gathered in coffeehouses in Greenwich Village and San Francisco where they shared their poetry and said cool things like “Daddy-O.” Well, the Beat Generation came and went years ago, but the connection between coffeehouses and poetry lives on in Huntersville at Waterbean Coffee.

Area poets Diana (Dede) Mitchell and Caroline Kane Kenna recently contacted me about their upcoming poetry reading at Waterbean Coffee, and they mentioned a regular event called Waterbean Poetry Night. Intrigued, I asked them for more information about this event and about their recently published collections of poetry. Here is what they sent to me:

Lake Norman Writers, Diana (Dede) Mitchell and Caroline Kane Kenna will be featured readers at Waterbean Poetry Night at the Mic in Huntersville on Wednesday, July 22.

Waterbean Poetry Night at the Mic, is a free reading series with a featured poet or two plus an open mic. The readings are a labor of love for co-founder and host Leslie M. Rupracht. Since 2015, she has welcomed featured poets to the stage to read from newly published books. A poet herself, Leslie opens the mic for regulars and first-timers alike to share words at Waterbean Coffee-Huntersville in the Northcross Shopping Center at 9705 Sam Furr Road.

Leslie and her co-founder and former co-host Jonathan K. Rice were the long-time editors of Iodine Poetry Journal, Waterbean Poetry Night’s original sponsor. They wanted to offer a safe, inclusive and supportive forum in the Lake Norman/northern Mecklenburg County region of Metro Charlotte, and they found a partner with Waterbean Coffee’s owner, Tony Vo. After Iodine published its final issue in 2017 and Rice stepped back from co-hosting, Leslie carried on without a sponsor. She won’t tell you how many hours she dedicates but she is the chief inspiration officer, books the poets and creates the buzz and the publicity, prior to hosting on event night. She appreciates Jonathan’s continued support as stage manager, and welcomes helping hands from fellow poets to carry the lectern, mic and the Tiny Tabletop Library dedicated in memory of native South Carolinian poet friend, Mike James.

A Lake Norman poetry ambassador whose mission is fostering diversity, kindness, community and peace through poetry, Leslie has nurtured the community that she and Rice originally envisioned. “I’m proud to say our featured poets and open mic readers breathe diversity, bridging gaps between generations, from teens to octogenarians, and representing differing gender identities, sexual orientations, ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds, educations, and levels of writing experience. Many also face a variety of physical and mental health challenges as shared poems reveal. We all support each other, and the love for our inclusive, creative community is palpable.”

Leslie offers space to both established and emerging poets. She has collaborated with Charlotte Poet Laureate Junious “Jay” Ward and Anne Kaylor publisher of the Kakalak anthology of poetry and art. The inaugural Charlotte Youth Poet Laureate Vanessa Hunter shared the stage with Jaki Shelton Green, our esteemed NC Poet Laureate. Former NC Poets Laureate Joseph Bathanti and Shelby Stephenson have also graced the space. Regulars like Troutman’s Joyce Compton Brown and husband Les Brown and many Pushcart nominees including Gary V Powell of Cornelius, have launched multiple collections from here. Leslie has grown the audience from a cohort of writers and friends sharing their work to a packed house where poets travel from Charlotte, Hickory, and well beyond to be inspired, to read their poems and be heard. Here’s a link to the complete list of featured poets:
https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1035581558555757&id=100063117677566&rdid=adMqRWxNPyAUe4I7

Diana (Dede) Mitchell and Caroline Kane Kenna

Caroline Kane Kenna and Diana (Dede) Mitchell have been in this audience and have tested their poems at the mic. They have seen the reading series grow and have cheered on fellow poets and each other. On Wednesday, July 22, they will step into their first Waterbean spotlights as they debut their books of poems.

We Are All Singing (The Bridge 2026) is Dede’s collection and Caroline’s chapbook is Keep Your Damn Seat (Finishing Line Press 2026). Join us, bring a friend and a poem for the open mic. Slots fill up fast, so arrive early to sign up in person. https://facebook.com/events/s/july-22-waterbean-poetry-night/1003149155747018/

Dede’s Comments: This collection, We Are All Singing, grew out of an experience of loss and the associated emotions that arise from it. About twenty years ago, on the Friday before Mother’s Day, my lively and loving mother experienced a severe stroke that left her partially paralyzed and without speech—interrupting her life and her family’s lives. Emergency room conversations, consultations with doctors, test after test, inpatient rehab and speech therapy, outpatient rehab and speech therapy, new equipment, changes in the home. Depression, fatigue, confusion, anger, frustration, helplessness, the grasping for hope and a little faith and always love, in its many guises.

To paraphrase William Wordsworth, “Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility,” I’m not sure how much tranquility was involved, but I found myself writing poem after poem in the cauldron of experience and feeling. Eventually, one poem took shape that included the voice of my mother, imagined. We’d had so many years of words between us, mostly good, funny, deep and honest. The sudden emptiness left me searching memory and imagination for what was no longer present, what needed a voice, what wanted telling. This collection is the result—a loose narrative of our story that begins with the stroke and goes back and forth in time, offering scenes from the mother’s life and the daughter’s and their lives together.

Caroline’s Comments: Keep Your Damn Seat (Finishing Line Press 2026) is my first solo project. I have been practicing for this moment for 10 years. Without the eyes and ears of my poets’ village: The Charlotte Writers Club critique groups, Table Rock Writers Workshop, and the opportunities to share work, online and at local events and open mics, there would be no chapbook.

Like most writers I know, I write to understand why, to process the world and my place in it. Newspaper editors were my first writing coaches. Three sons and the life my husband Mike and I chose gave me the time and reasons to keep writing. When the last corporate move settled the family in Huntersville, I connected with the Tuesday Morning Writers, and we wrote ourselves into lasting friendship and a poetry anthology, Above the Fold (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2014) was a spark for this and more.

Keep Your Damn Seat is poetry shaped by time, talk and quiet fires, a dream come true in crone age as dreams shift or are reimagined for two. The moving parts of life, what home looks like, and perhaps order, keeping family stories alive for my children and grandchildren.

This cover is the painting “Little Birds” by Charlotte poet/artist and baseball-talking friend Chris Arvidson. When I bought it and hung it in my office, I knew it was the perfect fit for poems. The transition from woman to bird mirrors life and the writing process. Thanks to Chris, Janet Dyer and Queen City Arts, I’ll be reading on Saturday August 8^th at the gallery at 4237 Raleigh Street, Charlotte, during the opening of exhibits, Words on the Street and the Latrina Ekphrastic Refresh. My poems are inspiration for the “refresh” art.

Caroline and Dede will also be at Main Street Books in Davidson on Thursday August 22, for Local Poets’ Night. Join us at 7 pm as we have a conversation about family and share our poems.

I congratulate Dede and Caroline on the publication of their new poetry collections, and I thank them for sharing information about their upcoming reading at Waterbean Coffee. As I understand it, everyone in the Storied Charlotte area is welcome to come to the reading, and you don’t even have to bring a bongo drum or wear beret.

Honoring Jeffrey B. Leak and His Legacy as a Scholar

July 04, 2026 by Mark West

Dr. Jeffrey B. Leak died on June 29, 2026. Jeffrey was my friend and a long-time colleague at UNC Charlotte. I first met Jeffrey in 1998 when he joined the English Department. At the time, we were the only members of the department with PhDs in American Studies, and this commonality drew us together. We often talked about our shared interest in the complex connections between American literature and American history, and we sometimes discussed our current research projects.

Over the course of his career at UNC Charlotte, Jeffrey held numerous leadership positions, including President of the Faculty, Director of the Center for the Study of the New South, Director of the American Studies Program, and Interim Associate Dean of the Honors College, but throughout his illustrious career he remained an active scholar. In the coming days, I am sure others will write about Jeffrey as a family man, as a Deacon with the Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, as a dedicated teacher, and as a university and community leader. However, since I have read much of Jeffrey’s published scholarship, I will focus this blog post on Jeffrey’s legacy as a scholar.

Jeffrey was interested in understanding how social forces, such as racism, shaped the lives of individual people. Jeffrey’s intellectual curiosity was often sparked when a person responded in a unique or unpredictable way to such social forces. Jeffrey’s interest in the Black conservative writer George S. Schuyler relates to this side of Jeffrey’s scholarship. Jeffrey wanted to know how and why a Black socialist writer from 1920s eventually became a well-known conservative writer during the 1960s and early ‘70s. Jeffrey did extensive research on why Schuyler eventually turned against many of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Jeffrey’s curiosity about Schuyler’s changing views is reflected in his first book, an edited volume titled Rac(e)ing to the Right: Selected Essays of George S. Schuyler. Published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2001, this collection established Jeffrey as an up-and-coming scholar in the field of Black Studies.

Jeffrey’s second book, a monograph titled Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature, was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2005. In this book, he explored the portrayal of Black masculinity in several key literary works, including Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Jeffrey drew on Black feminist criticism and gender studies in this book, and in the process, he challenged prevailing stereotypes regarding Black males in American culture. As Priscilla Ramsey said in her review of the book in The Journal of African American History, “Leak presents a complex and sophisticated analysis of racial and sexual mythmaking in the works of major African American literary figures in the 20^th century.”

Jeffrey’s third book, a literary biography titled Visible Man: The Life of Henry Dumas, was released by the University of Georgia Press in 2014. Jeffrey’s biography of Henry Dumas, a promising African American writer and poet who died in 1968 at the age of 33, is as much a study of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s as it is an account of Dumas’s short life. In writing this biography, Dr. Leak drew heavily on his expertise in the areas of African American literature and culture and the history of the Civil Rights Movement. He also, however, drew on personal interviews, archival research, and his own insights into Dumas’s poetry and other writings. Jeffrey’s biography of Dumas received the top award for a nonfiction book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.

I had the privilege of working with Jeffrey on one of his final scholarly projects. He wrote the chapter on Jimmy Carter’s An Hour Before Daylight, Carter’s autobiographical account of his childhood, for The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), which I co-edited with Frye Gaillard. Jeffrey and I shared a long-standing interest in Carter, so I invited him to write the chapter on Carter’s autobiography. Jeffrey was already experiencing health problems when I reached out to him, but he readily agreed to take on the project. When it was time to do the final edits on his chapter, he was in a hospital undergoing treatment. I informed him that I would take care of the final edits myself, but he insisted on finishing the chapter on his own even though this meant that he was writing from his hospital bed. His dedication to his scholarship impressed me then, and it still impresses me.

Jeffrey will be missed by many in Storied Charlotte and far beyond, but his scholarship will live on for years to come.

Tags: Jeffrey Leak

Celebrating Independence Day with Landis Wade

June 27, 2026 by Mark West

Landis Wade wears many hats. He is a mystery writer, a doting grandfather, a former podcaster, and, as he puts it, a “recovering trial lawyer.” He is also, however, a devoted history buff. His interest in history is reflected in his Indie Retirement Mystery series. The first book in this series, Deadly Declarations (2022), is structured around a mystery that relates to the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, and the second book, Deadly Gold Rush (2026), deals in part with the history of gold mining in Charlotte during the 1830s.

In the process of conducting the research for Deadly Declarations, Landis immersed himself in the history of the American Revolution and its connections to the Charlotte area. Given his expertise on this topic and since the 4^th of July is just around the corner, I contacted Landis and asked him if he could recommend some excellent books that relate to Independence Day. Here is what he sent to me:

It is interesting how the U.S. marks 250 years of independence from the year we declared independence in 1776 and not the year we won it in 1783.

Sure, 1776 was the year the founders signed the Declaration of Independence, but at that time, independence was far from a sure thing. David McCullough’s book—1776—published July 4, 2006, by Simon & Schuster demonstrates this point from the perspectives of the people who experienced the action in a way that only a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award can do. 1776 is one of my favorite books on the era because it reads like a novel and reveals what happened in the year when George Washington and his army barely escaped utter defeat. The parade was almost over before it started, and the stories of how the patriots snatched victories late in the year from the early jaws of defeat is an engaging tale. One story in the book I like is when Washington sent Howe to abandoned Fort Ticonderoga in New York to recover British cannons, and against all odds and extreme conditions, he and his troops did so, allowing Washington to use the cannons to force the British to abandon Boston. My wife and I are going to visit Fort Ticonderoga this summer.

1776 was a companion book to McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography of John Adams, the second U.S. president who contributed to independence in so many ways. It reads even more like a novel because it is based on extensive writings by Adams’ family. If you prefer the screen, the HBO miniseries based on the book is excellent.

Amazon.com: The First American Declaration of Independence?: The Disputed History of the Mecklenburg Declaration of May 20, 1775 eBook : Syfert, Scott: Kindle Store

This is probably where I should slip in how surprised John Adams said he was in his 1819 letter to Thomas Jefferson that the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence signed one year earlier had been concealed from him—implying it was Jefferson who did so—and how Adams floated the idea in a letter to a friend that Jefferson may have plagiarized words from the Meck Dec when drafting “Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.” For an excellent historical account of the Meck Dec debate, I recommend Scott Syfert’s The First American Declaration of Independence? The Disputed History of the Mecklenburg Declaration of May 20, 1775.

A bookshelf about American independence is not complete without a book on Thomas Jefferson, a complicated and important founding father who did much for the country. If you’d like a single volume sweeping account of Jefferson’s life, check out Pulitzer Prize winning author John Meacham’s biography, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. And for more readings, check out the Monticello Suggested Reading List which is comprehensive enough to include books that show Jefferson’s contradiction between liberty for all and the slaves he held.

One story about Adams and Jefferson I find encouraging in the turbulent political times in which we live—where friends and family are divided by extreme politics and the flow of misinformation—is how despite their heated political differences when they were running for office, Adams and Jefferson later engaged in regular correspondence for many years until the day they died and (notwithstanding their short written skirmish about the Meck Dec) they treated each other with respect. In fact, they died on the same day fifty years to the day after signing the Declaration of Independence, almost as if they decided to take the curtain call together so neither one got more credit than the other.

Let me finish with another David McCullough recommendation. Yes, I do like McCullough, but here’s why. He is an excellent storyteller, but he is also an important historian who tells the truth about history and that truth matters to our future, more now than ever. In the book The American Spirit, Who We Are and What We Stand For, you will find a collection of speeches by McCullough. In the Introduction, he muses about going off to give speeches and sometimes feeling down about the state of things, only to come away from the experiences feeling refreshed having seen again and again “long-standing American values still firmly in place, good people involved in joint efforts to accomplish changes for the better, the American spirit still at work.” He says in one speech to read widely and when it comes time to ring the bell, “give the rope one hell of a pull.”

In this 250^th year after our fight for independence, do something revolutionary. Fight the misinformation. Read history books that don’t reshape the past. Read books that make you think. And while you’re at it, read banned books. Adams, Jefferson, and McCullough would approve, and as Thomas Paine would say, it’s only Common Sense.

I thank Landis for providing these reading recommendations. There is one book, however, that he left off his list, and that’s his own excellent mystery Deadly Declarations. For readers who want to know more about this book as well as Landis’s other publications, please click on the following link: https://landiswade.com/

All the books that Landis recommends provide insights into the history of the Patriots’ fight for independence. As we celebrate Independence Day here in Storied Charlotte, we should remember that we are not just celebrating our independence from Great Britain; we are also celebrating our ancestors’ determination to declare their independence from being ruled by a king.

Tags: Independence Day Landis Wade

Lisa Williams Kline’s New Novel about a Writers’ Group, Book Banning, and the Experience of Living in a Retirement Community

June 20, 2026 by Mark West

Now that I am in my 70s, I am drawn to stories featuring characters who wrestle with the challenges of getting older, for I am dealing with such challenges myself. Scarcely a week goes by without somebody asking me if I am planning to retire, which I am not, but I have many friends who have retired and who have made the decision to move into retirement communities. I am curious about their experiences, so when I heard that Lisa Williams Kline has recently published a novel set in a retirement community, I decided to investigate.

The novel is titled The Bristlecone Writers’ Group. It focuses on a small group of writers who live in or are affiliated with the Bristlecone Retirement Community, and they all are members of the same writing group. One day one of the members dies, and her death sets into motion a series of revelations and events involving the writing process, book banning, and a mystery surrounding the woman who died. Wanting to know more, I contacted Lisa and asked her about her new novel and how she came to write it. Here is what she sent to me:

Thank you so much for the invitation to write about the inspirations for my new book, The Bristlecone Writers’ Group. I’ve lived in the Charlotte area since 1997, and in Davidson since 2014. I was president of the Charlotte Writers’ Club many years ago, when we still met at the Great Aunt Stella Center. Mary Kratt, who had been president before me, kindly took me under her wing and showed me the ropes. Later, I had the pleasure of working at Novello with Frye Gaillard, Amy Rogers, and Betsy Thorpe. After Novello closed, Eleanor Brawley hired me as an administrative assistant on her narrative photographic program for the Levine Museum, Families of Abraham. When I was moving from writing children’s books to adult fiction, I attended Queens to earn my MFA. Now, I get into Charlotte several times a month, as one of our daughters lives in Plaza Midwood, one of my writers’ groups (Betsy Thorpe and Emily Pearce) meets at Amelie’s on Park Road, and I still belong to CWC and Charlotte Lit. I am in a group called Lake Norman Writers, a spin-off from Charlotte Writers’ Club North, with Ann Campanella, Gilda Morina Syverson, Tootsie O’Hara, Sandra Phillips, Connie Fisher, Caroline Kenna, Tara Marshall, Dede Mitchell, and Tammy Wilson. I consider myself lucky beyond measure to have been welcomed by and become part of the writing community here.

I realized a few years ago that writing had been a huge and important part of my life – I still hardly feel that something has truly happened to me until I have processed it by writing about it – but I had never in a novel addressed the idea of how writing can affect a person’s life, or how dreams of writing can be deferred and then at last fulfilled. So that’s where the idea for the novel began.

The Bristlecone Writers’ Group is a story about what happens after one member of a writers’ group in a retirement community dies and the others discover a list of banned books in her otherwise empty briefcase. Time and the revelation of secrets change what they thought about their lost friend, and her work. Solving the mystery together brings deeper and more meaningful connections, and the characters experience second chances at lifelong dreams and even love.

The book takes place in a fictional town named Eden Forest, which is a blend of Winston-Salem, where I grew up, and Davidson, where I live now. The retirement community in the book is a blend of several different communities such as Salemtowne, where I spent time with my mother, the community in Delaware, where my husband’s mother stayed, and the Pines, in Davidson, where several members of my old writing group now live. The bookstore is based primarily on Main Street Books in Davidson, with vibes from Park Road Books, Trope Bookshop, Fred and June’s, and other beloved independent bookstores in the Charlotte area.

I also wanted to write about older people, whose lives are so much more complicated than many people think. When I was young, I thought that our most important decisions were made in our youth. But by the time we are older, our lives can be exceedingly more complex than before, with ex-spouses, children and stepchildren, and our decisions markedly more difficult. Also, I’ve found there’s more freedom and fun in being older than I realized. Though the characters are all fictional in The Bristlecone Writers’ Group, many of the stories are true, told to me by family and friends. Such as the story of the woman with two husbands in the same retirement community. Or a couple who divorce over whether to move to a retirement community or not. Or a wife selecting the next wife for her husband should she pass away.

And I wanted to write about the importance of books and reading. I learned about Banned Books from the Big Chair when I attended the American Library Association Conference in San Diego in 2024. A huge chair was set up in the lobby, and anyone could sit there, looking swallowed by it, like Edith Ann on Laugh-In (boy am I dating myself) and read a passage from one of their favorite banned books. This simple expression about the freedom to read moved me so deeply that I decided to include it in my book. I’m also a member of Authors Against Book Bans and appreciate the tools this organization offers to fight this dangerous practice.

I had written about animals in my books for children, such as the Sisters in All Seasons series, in which each book focused on an adventure with a wild animal. But I’d never focused on animals in my adult books, and I wanted to explore how pets become such important furry family members, especially as we get older. Our dog Joni played Bruiser Woods in the Davidson Community Players’ production of Legally Blonde: The Musical, and it was an absolute delight to include that as part of my story.

Other writing challenges I wanted to take on with this book were interweaving multiple voices and making some of the voices unlike myself. A teacher at Wildacres, Louise Hawes, once challenged me to create diverse casts for my books, and I have been trying to do a better job of that ever since.

At Park Road Books on July 30 at 6:30, dear friends and gifted writers in my writers’ group, Betsy Thorpe and Emily Smith Pearce, will interview me about The Bristlecone Writers’ Group. Special guest Joni, aka Bruiser Woods, will also be there, in her Harvard t-shirt, ready to greet everyone.

For readers who want to know more about Lisa and her writings, please click on the following link: www.lisawilliamskline.com

I thank Lisa for providing me with information about her new novel and for providing everyone in Storied Charlotte with a behind-the-scenes look at life in a retirement community.

Tags: Lisa Williams Kline

Introducing the Carolina New Works Play Festival

June 14, 2026 by Mark West

Most of my friends and colleagues at UNC Charlotte know that I am currently serving as the Interim Chair of the University’s Department of Theatre. For me, one of the pleasures of serving in this position is getting to know the faculty members in the department and learning about their various projects and activities. One such faculty member is David Janowiak. David’s latest project is launching the Carolina New Works Play Festival. Working together with Three Bone Theatre, David organized this festival to showcase new plays by playwrights from North and South Carolina. In response to my request for more information about this festival, he provided me with the following press release written by Meg Whalen:

Inaugural Carolina New Works Play Festival presents winning works in July. The festival is a collaboration between the Department of Theatre and Three Bone Theatre.

Three highschoolers on the last day of senior year. A gay man returning to his small Southern hometown and aging parents. Ambitious Los Angeles creatives tempted by ChatGPT.

These characters will breathe their first when the Carolina New Works Play Festival presents its inaugural cohort of plays in two sets of public staged readings July 24-26 and July 31-Aug. 2.

Founded by the UNC Charlotte Department of Theatre and Three Bone Theatre, the Carolina New Works Play Festival showcases plays from North and South Carolina playwrights, selected through a rigorous juried process. This year’s winning plays are “TRE,” by T.J. Lewis; “How I Got Forgotten,” by Glenn Rawls; and “You Can’t Smoke in Burbank,” by Skylar Schock.

In “TRE,” Tay, Rey and Bree find themselves on the last day of senior year, fumbling through life and contemplating what comes next. What are they doing with their lives? Where should they go to college? Who do they want to be as grown-ups? And why do they keep kissing each other?

In “How I Got Forgotten,” a newly single gay man returns to his small Southern hometown after his mother’s heart attack. As he sees his mother slip toward dementia, he realizes she has been covering for his father, a retired history professor who is in the grips of Alzheimer’s.

“You Can’t Smoke in Burbank” takes on the art versus AI dilemma, as three Los Angeles-based creatives use ChatGPT to finish an assignment. That decision thrusts them into unexpected circumstances that challenge their ideas about success, entertainment and making something matter.

Following two weeks of rehearsals with local directors, actors and dramaturgs, each play will receive two professional staged readings: July 24-26 at Rowe Recital Hall on the campus of UNC Charlotte and July 31-Aug. 2 at The Arts Factory on West Trade Street.

After each reading playwrights and artists will host post-show discussions with the audience. Audiences will witness the creative process, and their feedback will become part of the plays’ development.

For more information about the 2026 festival performances, including showtimes, and the guidelines for future play submissions, visit the CNWPF webpage.

I am pleased to report that the following UNC Charlotte students are participating in this year’s festival:

Lydia Elder: Stage Manager for How I Got Forgotten by Glen Rawls
Ashlin Heise: Stage Manager for Tre by TJL
Micah Jordan: Actor–Reynardo in Tre by TJL
Jordan Goddard: Actor–Skylar in You Can’t Smoke in Burbank (YCSIB) by Skylar Schock
Anna Bailey: Actor–Student/Waiter in YCSIB by Skylar Schock
Katherine Macguire: Actor–Taylor Bell/Instructor in YCSIB by Skylar Schock

I congratulate David and the good folks associated with Three Bone Theatre on the launching of the inaugural season of the Carolina New Works Play Festival. I am proud that Storied Charlotte is home to this new festival.

Tags: Carolina New Works Play Festival

Mark Peres’s New Memoir about His Father

June 06, 2026 by Mark West

With Father’s Day just around the corner, now is a perfect time to showcase Mark Peres’s new memoir about his father. Titled The Man Who Lived a Hundred Lives, this memoir not only tells the story of the remarkable life of Mark’s father, but it also touches on Mark’s relationship with his father. I recently contacted Mark and asked him for more information on The Man Who Lived a Hundred Lives and how he came to write it. Here is what he sent to me:

Father’s Day arrives differently at different stages of life.

As a child, Father’s Day is about gratitude. As a young adult, it can become an occasion for distance, independence, or even rebellion. But as the years pass, something changes. We begin to see our fathers not merely as parents but as people: complex, imperfect, contradictory people who lived entire lives before we arrived and who carried burdens, dreams, losses, and aspirations that we only partially understood. My memoir, The Man Who Lived a Hundred Lives, emerged from that realization.

The book began with a conversation. In 1992, when my father was in his seventies and I was standing at a crossroads in my own life, I sat down with him in Miami and began asking questions. I thought I knew his story. After all, he was my father. I knew where he had lived, what jobs he had held, and some of the colorful anecdotes that surfaced at family gatherings. But as the interviews unfolded, I discovered how little I knew.

My father, Ambrosio Benchimol Peres, had lived one improbable life after another. He grew up in a Jewish community deep in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil. He was an early voice on the radio, a revolutionary, a law student, an AWOL soldier in the Brazilian Army. He sold lingerie in Havana before the Cuban Revolution. He migrated to the United States and took on odd jobs. He traveled the world, created wealth, and lost it all. He moved our family repeatedly, always chasing opportunity and imagining a better future just over the horizon. Over the course of his life, he seemed to become several different people, each adapted to a different place and time.

I still remember the yellow legal pads on the table and the tape recorder between us. Occasionally my father would pause, stare into the distance, and retrieve a memory that had lain dormant for decades. In those moments, I felt less like a son and more like a passenger carried to places and times I had never known.

The title of the memoir came naturally. My father did not simply live a long life. He lived many lives. Yet the deeper I listened, the more I realized that the story was not only about adventure or resilience. It was about identity. It was about what we inherit from our parents and what remains hidden from us. It was about the mysteries that exist even within the families we believe we know best.

The interviews sat in boxes and folders for decades. Like many people, I was busy building a career, raising a family, and pursuing other ambitions. The recordings and transcripts became part of the background of my life: important, cherished, but unfinished.

Years later, after my father’s death, I returned to them. By then, the urgency felt different. I was no longer simply collecting family history. I was trying to preserve a voice before it disappeared. I was trying to understand the arc of a life that stretched across continents and generations. I was trying to answer a question that many sons eventually confront: Who was my father when he wasn’t my father? The answer turned out to be richer and far more surprising than I could have imagined.

Charlotte played an important role in bringing that story into the world. For more than two decades, Charlotte has been my adopted hometown. It is where I have taught, raised a family, built friendships, and helped create organizations devoted to conversation, ideas, and civic life. The memoir found its final form through the encouragement of Charlotte’s literary community.

One of the most important influences was the Charlotte Lit Author’s Lab. Writing is often described as a solitary act, but books rarely emerge from solitude alone. They require readers, teachers, editors, and fellow travelers who help us see what is working and what is not. The Author’s Lab provided exactly that kind of community. Over many months, I shared pages, received feedback, wrestled with structure, and learned how to transform recorded interviews and memories into a narrative that readers could experience as a page-turning story.

The process taught me something unexpected. Memory preserves facts, but storytelling reveals meaning. Perhaps that is why Father’s Day feels so connected to this book. For many of us, the day on the calendar is not merely a celebration of a parent. It is an invitation to remember. To ask questions. To listen more carefully. To recognize that the people who raised us contain entire worlds that we may never fully know.

Writing the book allowed me to spend one more season in conversation with my father. It allowed me to see him not simply as the man who raised me but as a fellow traveler navigating uncertainty, reinvention, love, disappointment, hope, and time.

In the end, that may be what every family story is about. We begin by trying to understand our parents. Along the way, we discover that we are also trying to understand ourselves.

For readers who want to know more about Mark and his writings, please click on the following link: https://www.markperes.com/

I congratulate Mark on his new memoir, and I thank him for sharing the story behind the writing of this memoir. I also thank him for his many contributions to our community from founding the online magazine Charlotte Viewpoint (which ran from 2003 to 2016),to leading the Charlotte Center for the Humanities & Civic Imagination, to writing the speculative fiction novel The Accord. With the publication of The Man Who Lived a Hundred Lives, Mark is now also part of Storied Charlotte’s ever-widening circle of memoirists.

Tags: Mark Peres memoir

Classic Children’s and YA Books Set in the Summer

June 01, 2026 by Mark West

The summer solstice will take place on June 21, 2026, which technically marks the beginning of summer. However, I am sure that most of the students in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) think that the real beginning of summer will arrive on the afternoon of June 10, 2026, which is the last day of the 2025-2026 school year. The sense of liberation that students feel on the last day of school is captured in Alice Cooper’s famous hit, “School’s Out,” or as it is sometimes called, “School’s Out for Summer.” In this song, Alice Copper sings about “no more books,” and I am sure that is how many students feel, but for some students, summer is a time to read books for pleasure. I was such a student when I was growing up. Today’s Storied Charlotte blog post is for readers of all ages who read for pleasure and who are interested in classic children’s and YA that take place during the summer.

One such classic is Maureen Daly’s coming-of-age novel Seventeenth Summer. Published in 1942, this novel is often cited as one of the key books that shaped the nature of contemporary YA literature. It’s written in first person, and it captures the emotions of a teenage girl who falls in love for the first time. Daly wrote the book while she was still in college, so she could still easily relate to the way teenagers often think about relationships. Angie Morrow, the central character, is a bright but very naïve teenager who has lived a sheltered life. I recently taught this book in my course on classic American children’s literature. My students liked Angie and were pleased with her determination to go to college, but they were surprised at how clueless Angie often is when interacting with Jack, her first boyfriend. In some ways, Seventeenth Summer seems a bit tame by today’s standards, but in the opinion of my students, Angie’s emotional responses still ring true.

Another classic book set during the summer is Virginia Hamilton’s debut novel, Zeely, which came out in 1967. Following the publication of this middle-grade novel, Hamilton went on to become a famous African American children’s author. In Zeely, a girl named Elizabeth and her brother John spend the summer on their uncle’s farm. There they meet Zeely Tayber, a tall Black woman living on a neighboring farm. Elizabeth has a very active imagination, and she imagines that Zeely is Watutsi queen living in exile. For Elizabeth, her fantasies about her neighbor are put in a new light when she gets to know Zeely as a real person. The novel focuses on the characters’ interactions, and it wonderfully captures the workings a child’s imagination.

My last recommendation is Bette Greene’s 1973 historical novel titled Summer of My German Soldier. Set in a small town in Arkansas during World War II, this novel focuses on a 12-year-old Jewish-American girl named Anne Bergen. She befriends Fredrick “Anton” Reiker, a young German POW who escapes from a nearby prison camp. Anton was drafted to serve in the German military even though he opposes Hitler and the Nazi Party. Their friendship ends up shattering her relationship with her family and puts her at odds with the town. I taught this course in a graduate seminar on Southern children’s literature, and my students were very impressed with how Greene deftly deals with the complexities of prejudice and wartime fervor. Summer of My German Soldier is far from an entertaining summer escape novel, but it is a memorable story.

I could recommend many other children’s and YA books that take place during the summer, but these three books stand out for me because they show how much story can be packed into three fleeting months. With summer vacation just around the corner, I hope that everyone in Storied Charlotte, whether they are school-aged or grownups, can spend part of their summer reading just for the pleasure of engaging with a well-told story.

Tags: Seventeenth Summer Summer of My German Soldier Zeely

Andrew James Hartley, William Shakespeare, and Julius Caesar

May 24, 2026 by Mark West

My friend Andrew James Hartley uses his full name when writing or editing scholarly books about William Shakespeare, but he usually writes as AJ Hartley when he is writing works of fiction. From 2005 until 2023, Andrew served as the Robinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at UNC Charlotte, and during that time he brought out numerous scholarly works related to Shakespeare’s plays. Upon his retirement in 2023, he told me that he planned to focus on writing fiction, so I assumed that he would not be bringing out any more scholarly books under his full name. I was wrong.

Andrew James Hartley’s Arden edition of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar came out on May 14, 2026. Part of the Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series, this edition is rooted in the first known performance of the play in London in 1599. It includes a critical introduction to the play’s textual, cultural and performance history. It also provides detailed on-the-page notes explaining language, character and performance. For more information about this edition, please click on the following link: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/julius-caesar-9781350110878/

I contacted Andrew and asked him for more information about this project: Here is what he sent to me:

My Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was almost nine years in the making. It began when I was invited by the editorial board to contribute a proposal for the play, since I had published two previous books on it (a performance history and an essay collection) along with a couple of student guides. It was daunting to say the least. I had only ever edited Shakespeare for specific stage productions so editing an actual edition—an Arden, no less—was extremely intimidating.

I began by identifying what the edition was to be. The new Ardens are committed to producing specific iterations of the plays rather than an ‘ideal’ composite text which combines or otherwise selects pieces from the earliest printed texts according to editorial preference. I aimed to recreate a clean version of the performance text of the first productions from 1599. That meant taking the earliest existing text (the Folio text of 1623), addressing its errors and ambiguities and restoring elements which—based on external evidence—seem to have been changed between the play’s first appearance on stage and the Folio’s printing. The Folio contains, for example, a number of significant mistakes about who is and is not present in key scenes. Some lines contain so-called textual cruxes where the precise meaning is unclear. Such discrepancies needed to be rectified. Other issues were less immediately apparent. Shakespeare’s friend and fellow playwright Ben Jonson made fun (twice!) of a line delivered by Caesar, but the line does not appear in the Folio text. I decided to restore it. (It’s a perfectly good line in terms of character, but contains a logical paradox which Jonson thought absurd).

After the proposal was approved by the board I had to deliver a sample scene. I chose act 3 scene 1, the assassination scene, because it contained several knotty problems particularly related to staging and casting. The sample scene is where you—hopefully– demonstrate your judgment in more than just textual editing; you have to show you can format the text correctly and according to the incredibly baroque Arden style sheet (currently at 34 closely typed pages). More importantly, you have to show how you will approach the things for which the Arden editions are best known, their full textual notes (in which you signal every significant alteration made by every editor in every previous edition produced over the last 400 years) and their extensive commentary notes. These are where the editor glosses or otherwise unpacks the content of difficult or suggestive words and phrases, shows how key performances have handled the choices presented by the given moment, and offers what you might call teachable insights. They are the meat of the edition, and sometimes fill more of the page than the Shakespearean text itself.

After the sample scene had been approved (late 2018), I went back to the first scene of the play and started over, working with a facsimile of the Folio text in front of me and every previous edition (physical or digital) to hand for cross checking. Most days I managed to get through about five lines of text, handling the textual notes and commentary as I went, though sometimes a single phrase would send me down the rabbit hole of research for days. As I completed each act, I would run it by the general editor assigned to me (Tiffany Stern) and respond to any questions she raised or errors of formatting etc. It was a long, slow business, and became my primary academic activity through the pandemic and beyond.

When it was done I turned to the introduction which, like everything else in the Arden edition is thorough and extensive, in this case, over a hundred pages of critical and performance history asserting the play’s inherently political dimension from its earliest days. Julius Caesar is shot through with specifically Elizabethan issues of political overreach and the threat of rebellion which has resonated for many subsequent periods (think of Orson Welles’ expressly Fascist Caesar in his 1937 production, or the Public Theatre’s collision with the first Trump administration in 2017). The edition also contains lengthy extracts from Shakespeare’s primary source, Plutarch’s Lives, and the usual academic apparatus of references and works cited. I expect it will be the go-to scholarly edition for many years to come. It is certainly the pinnacle of my academic career.

I’ll be talking about these things at Park Road Books on June 3^rd at 7pm where editions will be available for purchase.

I congratulate Andrew on the publication of his Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. As the publication of this edition demonstrates, Storied Charlotte is gaining a reputation as a center for Shakespeare Studies.

Tags: Andrew James Hartley Arden Shakespeare Series

ConCarolinas 2026 Is Nearly Here

May 16, 2026 by Mark West

Many Charlotte-area fans of fantasy and science fiction stories are eagerly anticipating the upcoming ConCarolinas convention. Scheduled to take place from May 29 through May 31 at the Hilton Charlotte University Place, ConCarolinas is expected to attract a wide range of fans, authors, performers, gamers, game designers, and cosplayers. For more information about this year’s convention, please click on the following link: https://concarolinas.org/

ConCarolinas is billed as the “Carolinas’ Longest Running Sci-Fi & Fantasy Con.” Established in 2001, ConCarolinas is celebrating its 25^th anniversary this year. In keeping with the convention’s long history of celebrating fandom in all its flavors, programming covers a wide range of topics. Here is the official description:

Our programming is designed to be fun and educational with an emphasis on literary arts, visual arts, and performing arts. We tie that all together with our love of science fiction, fantasy, superheroes, and gaming.

It’s a weekend full of entertainment, gaming, costumes, authors, films, music, discussion panels, and workshops with professionals in the entertainment and creative community. Come celebrate geekdom and meet some of the region’s most creative minds.

I am pleased to report that these “creative minds” include many writers of fantasy and science fiction from the Charlotte area. Among them are AJ Hartley, John G. Hartness, Darin Kennedy, Nicole Givens Kurtz, Gail Z. Martin, Larry N. Martin, James Nettles, and Nancy Northcott.

Although reading is usually a solitary activity, participating in fandom is not. There seems to be some sort of paranormal gravitational pull that brings fans of fantasy and science fiction together to celebrate their love of shared stories. In a sense, ConCarolinas is a big communal celebration. I always say that my blog is all about celebrating Charlotte’s community of readers and writers, so as I see it, Storied Charlotte and ConCarolinas are made for each other.

Tags: ConCarolinas

Reading Recommendations for Mother’s Day

May 09, 2026 by Mark West

I remember that my mother liked to spend Mother’s Day reading in bed. My brother, sister and I would bring her our handmade Mother’s Day cards in the morning, and then we would leave her alone with her book for most of the day. My mother passed away years ago, but I still associate Mother’s Day with reading. With this memory in mind, I decided to focus this week’s Storied Charlotte blog post on reading recommendations for Mother’s Day. I contacted Kathie Collins, the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Charlotte Lit, and Mary Alice Dixon, the author of the recently published poetry collection Snakeberry Mamas: Words from the Wild, and I invited them to recommend an excellent book that would be especially appropriate to read on Mother’s Day. I was pleased that they both accepted my invitation.

One of the reasons I reached out to Kathe Collins is that she recently taught a class at Charlotte Lit called “The Mother-Daughter Dyad in Myths, Fairy Tales, and Contemporary Culture.” I asked her if she could recommend a book that deals with the relationships between mothers and daughters. Here is what Kathie sent to me:

Mark, thanks for inviting me to contribute a short piece about mothers and daughters for Mother’s Day. I’m the mom of three thoughtful, loving, and successful adult daughters (as well as two incredible sons). Of course, I am a daughter, too, and lucky that my eighty-year-old mom is still thriving, mothering me with advice and worry as often as she can. Although I’ve not followed my mother’s footsteps completely, I’m sometimes awed by the number of ways in which my life has parallelled hers—even when, maybe especially when, I’m trying to go another way, to be a separate and distinct woman. No doubt my mother feels this pushing away and pushing against, as I feel it with my daughters, as a loss. For me, this daughter loss, however expected, always comes as a surprise, and brings with it fresh grief.

Love, loss, and grief are parts of the complex and intense relationship that is the mother-daughter bond—a relationship I would argue no author has captured better than Amy Tan in her acclaimed novel The Joy Luck Club, in which she explores these complexities, particularly as they occur within patriarchal culture, through the lens of four mother-daughter dyads. The following quote is from a scene in which the character An-mei Hsu explains how mothers try to prepare their daughters for the world, try to give them a life in which they can escape their mothers’ failures and insecurities, but nevertheless pass on both love and pain—trauma and resiliency seamlessly woven—from generation to generation: “And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.“

Tan’s novel, a National Book Award finalist, was published in 1989, just a few months before I became a mother for the first time; that is, before I knew what motherhood would make of me. Before I knew what it was to love a daughter. I reconnected with the work this spring as I prepared to teach a Charlotte Lit class on the mother-daughter dyad in classic and contemporary culture and found its themes not only more personally poignant than ever, but also just as socially relevant. So often, I hear people label the mother-daughter relationship as inherently difficult, as though women are simply wired to find fault in each other. What this book reminds us is that mothers, especially those in male-dominated cultures like our own, are forced to make difficult choices, whether conscious or not, about how to love their daughters while preparing them for a society that will rarely be looking out for their best interests. That is, they must love them while making them tough. Daughters are often wounded by that preparation. And still, love is as much a part of the story.

I reached out to Mary Alice Dixon in part because many of the poems in her collection Snakeberry Mamas relate to maternal behavior. After all, the word “mama” is in the title of the book. In Mary Alice’s poems, maternal behavior and the rhythms of nature are often interconnected. This theme is reflected in Mary Alice’s book recommendation. Here is what Mary Alice sent to me:

A book to read on Mother’s Day? Of course, there’s Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter. Unconventional, and perhaps unattractive mothers, but real. Which is what I ask of fiction. Books that capture the complexity of their eras. Surely the most searing portrait of motherhood in a novel has to be Toni Morrison’s The Beloved, in which Sethe, an escaped slave, kills her eldest daughter rather than allowing the girl to be returned to slavery. Morrison show us how the most brutal of circumstances shape a sacrificial maternal love.

But the book I most recommend to celebrate Mother’s Day is not fiction, not essay, not memoir, not psychology. It’s ecology: Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021). This is not a book,” Simard writes, “about how we can save the trees. This is a book about how the trees might save us.”

Simard’s pioneering study shows how old growth “Mother Trees” stand at the center of a social network, sustaining, feeding, and communicating with their saplings through underground networks of carbon energy transfer. With the voice of a poet, Simard describes this “flow of energy from the Mother Tree as powerful as the ocean tide, as strong as the sun’s rays, as irrepressible as the wind in the mountains, as unstoppable as a mother protecting her child.” In fact, a dying Mother Tree will pass “her life force straight to her offspring…. Dying enabled the living; the aged fueled their young.”

In this age of ecological and other crises, the Mother Trees rise, the “Beloveds” of the forest. They show us that if humans are to survive as a species, we must remember we spring from communal roots as interconnected, as sacred, as strong, as magnolia and oak. Read this book then hug a tree. Hug a child. Hug a mother. Plant a seed.

I thank Kathie and Mary Alice for their thoughtful book recommendations for Mother’s Day. I wish all the mothers in Storied Charlotte and beyond a happy Mother’s Day.

Tags: Finding the Mother Tree Mother's Day The Joy Luck Club