Given that March is Women’s History Month, now is an especially apropos time to celebrate the many women who have shaped the history of Charlotte’s community of readers and writers.  For the purposes of this blog post, I have selected six such women.  Not all of their names are widely known today, but each of them made a lasting contribution to our community.

Mary Rebecca Denny was the founding chair of the English Department at UNC Charlotte.  In 1946, Bonnie Cone hired Mary Denny as the first full-time faculty member at what was then called the Charlotte Center of the University of North Carolina.  Denny had been an English professor at Queens College (now called Queens University), but she decided to leave her position at Queens College and join forces with Bonnie Cone.  When the Charlotte Center evolved into Charlotte College in 1949, she stayed on and created the English Department.  From 1949 until 1964, she served as the chair of Charlotte College’s English Department.  Shortly after Charlotte College became the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Denny retired, becoming UNC Charlotte’s first professor emerita.  During her time as the chair of the English Department, she founded the college newspaper and a college literary magazine. The Denny Building at UNC Charlotte is named in her honor.

Mary T. Harper played a major role in introducing African American literature to the students at UNC Charlotte and to the larger Charlotte community.  When Dr. Harper joined the university in 1971, she was the first full-time Black faculty member in UNC Charlotte’s English Department.  She played a pivotal role in creating and teaching the first African American literature classes in the department.  In addition to her work at UNC Charlotte, she co-founded (with Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey) the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Afro-American Cultural Center in 1974.  This center is now known as the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture.  In her work with this center, she arranged for community programs and presentations on African American writers.

Irene Blair Honeycutt taught creative writing during her long tenure as a faculty member at Central Piedmont Community College.  In 1993, she founded CPCC’s Spring Literary Festival and served as the director of this festival for fourteen years. This festival expanded into CPCC’s Sensoria Festival, a celebration of literature and the arts. Upon her retirement in 2006, CPCC established the Irene Blair Honeycutt Lifetime Achievement Award.   Besides teaching and doing community engagement work, she published four poetry collections, the most recent of which is Beneath the Bamboo Sky, which came out in 2017.

Adelia Kimball founded the Charlotte Writers Club (CWC) on June 6, 1922, and served as the club’s first president.  She continued to lead the club until 1930 when she moved to New York City to work as an editor for the publisher Louis Carrier & Company.  During her tenure as CWC’s president, she organized and ran the club meetings, arranged for speakers, and helped found the club’s initial writing contest.  Now, more than 100 years after its founding, the Charlotte Writers Club is still going strong.  In recognition of her contributions to the history of the club, the club established the Adelia Kimball Founders Award for “extraordinary service to the CWC and the greater writing community.”

Dannye Romine Powell made her debut on the Charlotte literary scene in 1975 when she became the book editor for The Charlotte Observer.  She remained the paper’s book editor until 1992.  Back in those days, the paper published a two-page book section every Sunday.  It included original book reviews, interviews with authors, and news about local literary events. In her role as book editor, she often interviewed Southern authors.  She decided to collect these interviews in a book titled Parting the Curtains:  Interviews with Southern Writers, which came out in 1995.  In addition to her interview book, she has published five poetry collections, two of which have won the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell Award for best book by a North Carolina poet. 

Allegra Westbrooks was an important figure in the history of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. When she moved to Charlotte in 1947 to manage the Brevard Street Library branch of the public library, the library system was still segregated.  The Brevard Street Library was one of only two branches that served African Americans at the time.  After the library system desegregated in 1956, she moved to the Main Library where she ran the acquisitions operation before being promoted to Supervisor of Branches in 1957, making her the first African American to hold the position of supervisor in the library.  During her career with the library, she played a major role in developing the library’s outreach programs and expanding the library’s branch system.  She collaborated with community groups to make books available to children who did not live near branches, and she started a bookmobile program to bring books to residents throughout the county. In recognition of her many contributions, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Board of Trustees renamed the Beatties Ford Regional Library in her honor.  In April 2020, this branch became known as the Allegra Westbrooks Regional Library.

Each of these six women made lasting contributions to Charlotte’s community of readers and writers.  Storied Charlotte is a better and more vibrant place because of the work and leadership of Mary Rebecca Denny, Mary T. Harper, Irene Blair Honeycutt, Adelia Kimball, Dannye Romine Powell, and Allegra Westbrooks.

The Charlotte Mecklenburg Library is once again sponsoring its Community Read program.  The purpose of this month-long program is to encourage the members of the larger Charlotte community to read and discuss common texts that all deal with a central theme. For this year, the theme is friendship.  For more information about the Community Read program, please click on the following link: https://www.cmlibrary.org/community-read

This year’s Community Read program kicks off on March 1, 2023.  One of the people who is coordinating this program is Meryle Leonard, the Assistant Director of Outreach at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.  I contacted Meryle and asked her for more information about this year’s Community Read program.  Here is what she sent to me:

Don’t miss the opportunity to participate in the biggest book club in Charlotte. Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s Community Read runs throughout the month of March. The program focuses on creating community dialogue around the theme of friendship.

This year’s signature title is The People We Keep by Allison Larkin. In this story, the main character, April Sawicki, leaves her troubled past behind her determined to live life on her own terms. Making a life for herself, she encounters people and places she never dreamed of. Join April as she chronicles her journey in the beautiful music she creates and discovers home is with The People We Keep.

Read the book and meet the author, Allison Larkin. Allison Larkin will host an online presentation on Tuesday, March 21 at 6:30 p.m. Register for the event and you can win a chance to have Allison Larkin stream into your book club!

The Community Read is for everyone. There are titles for teens, preteens, and young children. These titles also focus on friendships. The Edge of Anything by Nora Shalaway Carpenter is the teen title. The story focuses on the unlikely friendship of two girls facing their inner demons. Uncover Mia Tang’s secrets in the preteen book Front Desk. Mia works in a hotel, hides immigrants, and has big dreams. Follow Mia and see if she finds the courage and kindness to help everyone as she follows her dreams.

The book for young children is The Big Umbrella.  Amy June Bates and her daughter got the idea to write The Big Umbrella after walking to school. Imagine it is raining, and you have a big umbrella. Everyone can fit under the umbrella! It doesn’t matter if you are tall, plaid, or hairy. You don’t have to worry, there will always be enough room for everyone!

There are many ways you can get involved in the Community Read program. Meet the authors. Nora Shalaway Carpenter will be at South County Regional Library on Tuesday, March 7, 2023, at 5:30 p.m. Kelly Yang will host an online presentation on Thursday, March 16, 2023, at 11:30 am. Take the Community Read Challenge. Log your reading and activity time and track your progress. Participate in a program. There are programs for all ages and reading abilities. You can participate in a library-led program or a program led by our community partners. Read the books, meet your neighbors, and come together as a community.

I urge everyone to participate in this year’s Community Read program.  By reading books in common and discussing them together, we can make Storied Charlotte a true community.     

I first got to know Landis Wade in his role as the founder and host (now co-host) of the Charlotte Readers Podcast. In this role, he has interviewed hundreds of writers.  Landis, however, is also an author in his own right.  He has published several books, including Deadly Declarations: An Indie Retirement Mystery, which came out last year. Landis is himself a retired trial lawyer.  He never studied fiction writing during his years as a history major at Davidson College or while earning his J.D. degree at Wake Forest School of Law, but since founding his podcast in 2018, he has learned a lot about the art of writing by interviewing authors.  When writing Deadly Declarations, he drew heavily on the insights he gained through conducting these interviews.  For Landis, hosting the Charlotte Readers Podcast has functioned as his own private M.F.A. program in creative writing.

Landis has now decided to share with the general public some of the insights and pointers that he has learned through hosting Charlotte Readers Podcast.  He has just released The Writing Life, a collection of “inspirational and practical reflections” that he has compiled from some of the interviews that he has conducted with authors.  Intrigued, I contacted Landis and asked him for more information about this project.  Here is what he sent to me:

I did not launch Charlotte Readers Podcast to publish a series of books about writing, but a funny thing happened on the way to and from the studio. The writers who appeared on the podcast inspired me with their tales of how they do what they do and it helped my own writing journey so much that I wanted to give back by sharing what I’d learned. And what better way to do that than to let the authors speak for themselves?

In Book 1 of the series, authors share their honest reflections on The Writing Life. We find inspirational and practical reflections of hard-working, award-winning, and New York Times bestselling authors in more than 33 U.S. states and five countries.

What I found from the quotes in book 1 is that writers grab for their pens and fire up their computers for the love of writing. They have a common urge to create, to use letters, words, and sentences to tell stories, either about themselves, or others, or about characters they create in their writing chambers. They write for therapy or to understand themselves and the world around them. They write for the sake of writing. They write for publication. They write to be remembered. They write to be heard and understood. And as more than one author says, they write because they can’t not write.

Through a painstaking seven-month process of listening to and transcribing excerpts from 500+ audio and video interviews, I realized I had the makings of more than one book. My co-hosts Sarah Archer and Hannah Larrew jumped in and helped me organize the content into eight separate books, and they also wrote forewords for the books. I wrote reflections for each book about what I learned from the quotes in each book.

Authors quoted in book 1 include David Baldacci, Therese Anne Fowler, Steve Berry, Lisa Jewell, John Hart, Sophie Cousens, Ron Rash, C.J. Box, Craig Johnson, Wylie Cash, Kristy Harvey, Brad Taylor, Charlie Lovett, Judy Goldman, Chris Fabry, Amber Smith, Tracy Clark, John Gilstrap, Kimmery Martin, A.J. Hartley, Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, Jason Mott, Mark de Castrique, Cathy Pickens, Mark West, David Joy, and many more local, regional, and nationally recognized authors.

Eight print books will release monthly, beginning March 1^st, and ebooks 2 through 8 in the series will release monthly, beginning April 1^st. We decided to make the first ebook our gift to the writing universe. It can be downloaded for FREE at this universal link: HERE. 

Charlotte Readers Podcast began with the tagline: “where authors give voice to their written words.” With this series, we’ve flipped the tagline to: “where authors give text to their spoken words.”

Readers who are interested in learning more about Landis’s latest project are in luck. On March 1^st, from 6:00 to 7:00 pm on Zoom, there will be a community conversation celebrating the release of Book 1, where the founders of Charlotte Lit and the three podcast co-hosts engage in a wide-ranging discussion with participants about The Writing Life, prompted by some of the best and most useful quotes in the book. Anyone can sign up for FREE for this conversation HERE.

I congratulate Landis on the publication of The Writing Life, and I look forward to the release of the other volumes in this series.  The contributions that Landis has made to Storied Charlotte are many and varied, and they now include a unique and insightful series of books about writing.

Valentine’s Day is not just about candy, flowers, and jewelry.  It’s also about stories. For readers who enjoy relationship stories, I have two book recommendations that have Charlotte connections.  One is The Plus One by Sarah Archer, and the other is Love and Valentines at Caynham Castle, a collection of five Valentine’s Day-themed novellas.  Both books are perfect for Valentine’s Day.

I first got to know Sarah Archer in her role as a co-host of the Charlotte Readers Podcast.  I heard her talk about The Plus One on the podcast, and I was intrigued when she described the novel as a romance story involving a woman and a robot.  I contacted Sarah and asked her for more information about the book and how she came to write it.  Here is what she sent to me: 

I’ve always loved an off-kilter romance, so when I had the idea of a robotics engineer who builds the perfect boyfriend, I immediately began playing out scenarios in my head. At first, I envisioned the story as a female-led version of the 1980s comedy Weird Science, but I knew from the start that my engineer would spend more than one wacky day and night with her robot—I wanted to see where this pairing could go if given the time to truly develop as a relationship. And while my background up to that point was primarily in screenwriting, I had wanted to write a novel since childhood, and this seemed like a fun entry point, so I decided to give it a go.

This premise offered a playing field on which to explore issues around AI and robotics technology (the new ChatGPT bot is scarily similar to some of the mechanisms behind my robotic romantic interest, Ethan), but also allowed me really to explore my human characters: what they look for in relationships, how they define love. The protagonist, Kelly, balks at the traditional expectations for love and relationships that society—and especially her mother, who runs a bridal boutique—have placed upon her. When we meet her at the beginning of the novel, she would doubtless prefer to spend this Valentine’s time of year at home by herself in a Slanket, watching a favorite movie, “baking” a cake for one in the microwave. The heart of the book is really about Kelly finding not just who she wants to be with, but who she wants to be, and I hope we can all embrace that theme around Valentine’s Day.

I was fortunate to get traditionally published, and the process of writing and promoting this book has taught me so much about the fiction world, and created opportunities for me to meet many wonderful writers and readers who are now my critique partners, social media buddies, and friends. In particular, it’s been an excellent bridge into the local Charlotte writing community. When the book was released, I had only moved to the area a month before. But I made an effort to dive in and start connecting with organizations like the Charlotte Writers Club as soon as I got here, and when I gave a reading at Park Road Books right after the novel’s launch, I was so pleased to see the seats filled by some of my new literary friends. I knew already I had stepped into an engaged and supportive writerly scene.

Since publishing The Plus One, I’ve been working on other novels, as well as several screenwriting and poetry projects, and have more recently fallen in love with the short story form. While some of my newer works are more literary in bent, I continue to enjoy any writing that straddles some kind of boundary, whether it’s the intersection of rom-com and sci-fi in The Plus One, or the line between drama and comedy, or reality and the otherworldly. I’m excited to be part of an expansive writing community here in Charlotte that embraces writers of every stripe and genre.

For readers who want to know more about Sarah and her writing, please click on the following link:  https://saraharcherwrites.com/

Even though Love and Valentines at Caynham Castle is set in England, the collection has significant associations with Charlotte since three of the five contributors are current or past residents of Charlotte.  One of these writers is Nancy Northcott (who happens to be my wife). I asked her for more information about this collection, and here’s what she sent to me:

Love and Valentines at Caynham Castle is the fourth in a series of holiday-themed romance anthologies set around an ancient English castle that’s now a hotel. The authors in this collection of novellas include Charlotte’s Morgan Brice (pen name of Gail Z. Martin) and Nancy Northcott and former Charlotte resident Caren Crane. The anthology offers various types of romances. In addition to the stories referenced below, there’s a paranormal featuring Greek gods and an ancient pub and a romantic suspense tale centered on a racing stable and a set of cursed racing silks. 

The One Who Got Away (by Nancy Northcott) is a second-chance-at-love story. Hastings Whitney grew up driven not only to succeed but to be seen to succeed. His focus on success cost him two marriages and any number of relationships. Now he has a second chance with the woman he never forgot, jewelry designer Corinne Lanier. Has he changed enough to balance work with a relationship? Or will a business crisis bring old habits back to the fore? And is there a sinister side to his problem?

Fae-ted Mates (by Morgan Brice) is part of the Kings of the Mountain MM romance fantasy series featuring Dawson and Grady King.  Dawson and Grady King are honeymooning at Caynham Castle, hoping to take a break from monster hunting. They have one piece of family business to handle, involving a generations-long agreement with the Welsh Fae. However, things go wrong, and Dawson and Grady are in danger of being trapped in the Faerie realm forever.

Romance Sells Records (by Caren Crane) features a heroine who is not interested in relationships.  After watching her mother’s hope for a grand romance get dashed time after time, Hannah Evans grew into someone with no tolerance for romance. Callum Hughes’ parents had an enviable relationship, and he wanted the same for himself: if only he could he convince Hannah to trust what they could build together.

The relationship stories included in these two books vary in significant ways, which is fitting since they feature characters who are quite different from each other.   However, these tales all have Storied Charlotte connections, and they all are great stories to read on Valentine’s Day.

Junious “Jay” Ward is one of Charlotte’s best-known poets.  His slam poetry performances are legendary.  In fact, in 2019 he was named the Individual World Poetry Slam Champion.  In addition to performing his original poems, he has had great success publishing poems in various journals as well as in a chapbook titled Sing Me a Lesser Wound (2020).  One of his most important recognitions came in April 2022 when the City of Charlotte officially named him the Poet Laureate of Charlotte.  Next month, will see the publication of Ward’s first full-length poetry collection.  Titled Composition, this collection has an official release date of February 7, 2023, but the book is already available for pre-order from Button Poetry:  https://buttonpoetry.com/product/composition/

I recently contacted Ward and asked him for more information about how he came to write Composition.  Here is what he sent to me:

The original set of poems that would later become Composition was kind of an exploration of my own Blackness, what it meant. But I knew that wasn’t the whole story. Why did I want to write about Blackness? What meaning did that hold for me, why was it important I explore that theme, why should anyone care? As I asked myself those questions, I realized this manuscript wasn’t simply about Blackness, it was about identity. It was about how we look at race and identity through the lens of being multiracial. It was about how we choose to identify, and how, often, people make that choice for us. It was also about being from the South.

I was raised in a rural town in eastern North Carolina. My father died when I was 21 years old. The manuscript evolved to include sub themes of grief, life in the rural South, and self-discovery. 

I interact with form, documents, and visual elements throughout the book. For example, it was important for me to not only capture the ‘spirit of conversation’ around interracial marriages at the time that my parents got married, 1969, but also to find a way to enter those conversations, to ‘talk back’ to certain documents. Some poems are blackouts or erasures of documents like Senate Bill 219, and include footnotes or annotations. Other poems are in form (sonnet, ghazal, contrapuntal, etc.) or are combinations of forms, so that each poem becomes kind of a metaphor for the entire manuscript.

As Charlotte’s inaugural Poet Laureate, I am keenly interested in bridging the perceived gap between “performance” poets and “literary” poets, as I’ve had a modicum of success in both arenas. I think this book is also a step in that direction; a blending of two mediums, a way to blur or solidify the lines, a way to ask ourselves what those lines even mean, or perhaps more importantly, a way to feel comfortable identifying oneself as being on either or neither side of those lines.

For readers who want to know more about Ward, please click on the following link:

https://jwardpoetry.com/home Charlotte is one of only a few cities that has its own Poet Laureate, and Charlotte is the only city that can claim Junious “Jay” Ward as a local poet.  In Japan, they call their gifted artists “Living National Treasures.” Well, as I see it, Ward is one of Storied Charlotte’s living treasures

In 2022, North Carolina Humanities celebrated its 50^th anniversary as the leading nonprofit organization charged with advancing public access to and support for the humanities across the state. North Carolina Humanities is the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). As part of its celebration, North Carolina Humanities launched North Carolina Reads, a statewide program in which participants read and discussed five books dealing with issues and concerns that face the residents of the state.  North Carolina Reads was so successful that North Carolina Humanities decided to bring back North Carolina Reads in 2023. 

The person who is coordinating this year’s North Carolina Reads program is Melissa Giblin.  She is the Director of the North Carolina Center for the Book, which is the North Carolina Humanities’ collection of literature and reading programs.  I reached out to Melissa and asked her for more information about North Carolina Reads.  Here is what she sent to me:

Building on the successes of the 2022 series, North Carolina Humanities has brought back its popular statewide book club, North Carolina Reads. In 2023 North Carolina Reads features five new books that explore issues of racial, social, and gender equality and the history and culture of North Carolina. The five selected books feature stories of American perseverance and diversity. The people, places, and events in the books also pose critical questions about how North Carolinians view their role in helping to form a more just and inclusive society.

At the heart of North Carolina Reads is NC Humanities’ desire to connect communities through shared reading experiences. Reading is important because it helps develop critical-thinking skills; strengthens minds, vocabulary, and mental health; and creates opportunities to empathize with others’ stories and experiences. North Carolina Reads uses books as a way to create space for talking about important, timely issues.

Starting in February 2023, NC Humanities will host virtual monthly book club events where participants will hear from guest speakers, including book authors and topic experts. Libraries, community groups, and individuals across North Carolina are encouraged to read along with NC Humanities and host community programs of their own to accompany NC Humanities’ virtual events.  The schedule for these events is listed below:

February 22, 2023 at 6:30 PM – Carolina Built an online conversation with author Kianna Alexander and Dr. Hilary Green

March 27, 2023 at 6:30 PM – Game Changers: Dean Smith, Charlie Scott, and the Era that Transformed a Southern College Town online conversation with author Art Chansky and Dr. Matt Andrews 

April 2023 – Money Rock: A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South – conversation with Pam Kelley. Other Book Club Details Forthcoming! 

May 23, 2023 at 6:30 PM – Under a Gilded Moon online conversation with author Joy Jordan-Lake and Dr. Jennifer Le Zotte

June 27, 2023 at 6:30 PM – Step It Up and Go: The Story of North Carolina Popular Music online conversation with author David Menconi and Dolphus Ramseur

North Carolina Reads is a unique book club. Not only is it one of the only statewide book clubs in North Carolina, but it is also an essential program resource for local, community-based book club groups and regional libraries. 

North Carolina Humanities encourages all North Carolinians to participate in North Carolina Reads. Watch our short video on how you can participate!  More information is available at https://nchumanities.org/program/north-carolina-reads  Please direct all North Carolina Reads-related questions to Melissa Giblin, Director of the North Carolina Center for the Book, at mgiblin@nchumanities.org or (704) 687-1526.

My appreciation goes to Melissa and the North Carolina Center for the Book for organizing this year’s North Carolina Reads program.  I understand that North Carolina Reads is a statewide program, but I take a certain amount of civic pride that the North Carolina Center for Book is headquartered in Charlotte.  As I see it, Storied Charlotte and the North Carolina Center for the Book are a perfect match.  

Over the past few years, I have been hearing a lot about Misha Lazzara.  I first heard her name from the creative writing professors in the English Department at UNC Charlotte.  They described Misha as a very talented graduate student who was studying fiction writing in our department.  I then heard that she had been accepted into the MFA program in creative writing at North Carolina State University.  Next, I heard that she had completed her MFA and had come back to our department to teach a creative writing course as a part-time faculty member.  Most recently, I heard that her debut novel, Manmade Constellations, had just been released by Blackstone Publishing.  Well, after hearing so much about her, I decided to check out her novel for myself.

Manmade Constellations is a road-trip story of sorts.  The novel begins when Lo Gunderson, an alienated young woman from a small town in Minnesota, responds to an ad for a “free car.” When she meets Blanche Peterson, the dying woman who is giving away the car, Lo learns that the free car comes with a condition.  Blanche wants Lo to find her estranged son.  Lo agrees to the deal, but first, she needs to get the car in running condition.  She gets help from a young car mechanic from North Carolina named John Blank, and he ends up joining Lo on her quest to find Blanche’s son. For much of the novel, Lo and John travel together, experiencing the American landscape and, in the process, learning a lot about each other.  The central characters become more and more complex as the story progresses.  They have secrets, difficult family histories, and longings that they don’t fully acknowledge or understand.  As a reader, you have a sense that you are traveling in the backseat with these characters, and they make for very memorable traveling companions. 

After reading Manmade Constellations, I contacted Misha and asked her how she came to write this novel.  Here is what she sent to me:

I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. When I was eight or nine my mom gifted me the children’s book The Lives of Writers by Kathleen Krull, which highlights the biographies of a dozen or two well-known writers including Murasaki Shikibu, who I happened to name a pet turtle after. There was also Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes, among others. Ostensibly, I had shown an interest in reading and writing as a young girl, but it was really with that book in my hand that I set my sights on the job title. 

However, as it does for many, life nuzzled in. It felt like I had only been handed my bachelor’s degree in English before I found myself married and starting a family. Later, when I entered UNC Charlotte to get my master’s degree eight years out of undergrad, I was pregnant with my third child while my husband traveled for work. With all those responsibilities, I applied to grad school with more “logical” intentions. The plan was to focus on English, so I might find a job teaching one day down the line, once my own kids were all set up in grade school. True, I had the unkempt and abandoned manuscript of Manmade Constellations, a novel I’d been working on through my twenties, in the proverbial drawer (a dusty computer file), but as I formed the Graduate School Masterplan with my husband, teaching English felt like the responsible thing to do.

That responsible thing lasted about a week into my first writing workshop with Dr. Aaron Gwyn, which happened to be the very first class I signed up for and the first graduate class I ever stepped foot into. I decided (bravely or naively, I can’t say) to switch my focus to creative writing. Still, I worked on a project that I deemed more serious–a wartime historical fiction that remains unfinished–up until the pandemic descended. 

By that time, I was almost halfway through my MFA at North Carolina State University. The work of homeschooling my kids, teaching Intro to Fiction for NCSU via Zoom, and taking my own course load made it clear to me that WWII research would not fit on the docket. So, I had an idea to rewrite that old story–Manmade Constellations–from scratch. 

For me, the book is largely a story about home. And for me, Minnesota is home. That’s where I grew up at least. When do we stop calling where we grew up ‘home?’ I don’t know if I’ll ever have an answer for that. I’ve lived here in Charlotte for almost fourteen years, and I only lived in Minnesota for eighteen. Time is catching up to me, I suppose, but still it was cathartic to revisit those old haunts–the lakes, the wood-paneled diners, and those flat stretches of highway broken up by even more lakes. 

Still, I knew that the South, and more precisely North Carolina, would have to fit into this story of home somehow. Since I first visited Marshall, a small railway town outside of Asheville, I’d been enthralled by the half-hidden settlement of “snake churches” in the area. In the book, John Blank, a good-natured Southern kid who trailed his way up to small-town Midwest, harbors secrets that connect to those enigmatic sanctuaries. 

So, if the question is how this novel came to be and how it relates to my life here in North Carolina, the answer is that I may have never written Manmade Constellations, or any book at all, if it hadn’t been for Dr. Lara Vetter encouraging me to apply at my first meeting at UNC Charlotte when I was unsure whether I was qualified for graduate school, or perhaps I’d never given it a shot if I hadn’t been so inspired by Dr. Gwyn’s writing workshop that first semester. 

Well, that, and also the snakes. 

For readers who want to know more about Misha, please click on the following link:  https://mishalazzara.com/?v=2e5df5aa3470

As a long-time member of UNC Charlotte’s English Department, I am always proud when our former students go on to do great things.  I am proud of Misha, and I highly recommend her debut novel.  There is a new star in Storied Charlotte’s literary galaxy, and it’s called Manmade Constellations.

With the end of each year, I always take a moment to look in the rear-view mirror before I step on the gas pedal and make my merge into the traffic of the new year.  For Charlotte’s community of readers and writers, 2022 turned out pretty well. The year saw the launching of Litmosphere: Journal of Charlotte Lit and the return of EpicFest, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s free literary festival for children and their families. The year also marked the return of the library’s Verse and Vino as an in-person event.  Numerous books by Charlotte writers came out in 2022.  Listed below are twelve of my favorites.  These books include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s books:

FICTION

Burning Shakespeare by A. J. Hartley.  In this time-travel novel, an American businessman and Shakespeare hater travels back in time to Renaissance London on a mission to eradicate Shakespeare from history.  He is countered by three recently deceased people from our time who are given an opportunity to come back to life if they go back in time and stop the businessman from carrying out his mission.

Deadly Declarations by Landis Wade.  This mystery novel is set in a fictional retirement community located in Charlotte.  Three residents of the “Independence Retirement Community” join forces to solve a mystery related to the famous and controversial Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.  The protagonists in this novel are anything but retiring.  They are feisty, independent, and fully engaged in the world around them.  They take on a powerful law firm, a corrupt politician, and a secret society and they prove that they are more than equal to the challenge. 

The Grand Design: A Novel of Dorothy Draper by Joy Callaway.  For the most part, this historical novel takes place in The Greenbrier, the famous resort in West Virginia.  The central character has much in common with Dorothy Draper, the pioneering interior designer who renovated The Greenbrier after it was used as a makeshift hospital during World War II.

Manmade Constellations by Misha Lazzara. This contemporary novel combines the pleasures of an American road-trip story with the emotional tug of a relationship story involving two traveling companions from quite different worlds.

Secret Lives by Mark de Castrique.  The central character in this thriller mystery is Ethel Fiona Crestwater, a 75-year-old retired FBI agent who runs a boardinghouse near Washington, D.C.  The reviewer from Publishers Weekly describes this character as “an elderly Nancy Drew” who is “ready to bend a few rules to achieve her goal of seeing justice done.”

Song of Redemption by Malika J. Stevely. Most of this historical novel takes place on a French and English-speaking plantation in Louisiana in the years just before the Civil War, but the opening chapter is set in 1932.  In this chapter, a group of construction workers are fixing up an abandoned plantation mansion when they discover the body of a woman behind one of the walls.  This event actually happened.  When Malika heard about it, she decided to write a novel based on the life of this woman.

NONFICTION

Child: A Memoir by Judy Goldman. In Child, Judy writes about her relationship with Mattie Culp, the Black woman who cared for Judy as a white Jewish girl growing up in Rock Hill, South Carolina, during the 1940s and ‘50s.  Judy examines how the racism of the Jim Crow South affected her relationship with Mattie.

Legacy:  Three Centuries of Black History in Charlotte, North Carolina by Pamela Grundy.  This book provides readers with a concise overview of the history of Black culture in Charlotte.  As Pamela documents in her book, African Americans have played important roles in the history of Charlotte from the origins of the city in the 1750s to the present day.

POETRY

The House Inside My Head by Chris Arvidson.  In this debut chapbook, Chris writes about specific places and her responses to these places.  Among the places she explores are Lake Michigan, Jerusalem, a bathroom at a rest stop, and the Elmwood Cemetery in Charlotte.

The Metaphorist by Martin (Marty) Settle.  The poems in this collection look at nature through a metaphorical lens.  To quote Marty, “This book of poetry comes, first of all, from my unending love of plants and animals. Over the years, I have become quite familiar with the flora, fauna, and fungi of our region. But these poems are not just any nature poems, but nature poems that are in line with current, ecological discoveries and philosophies.”

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

All the Places We Call Home by Patric Gopo.  In the beginning of All the Places We Call Home, a young girl spins a globe on her bedside table and wonders about the various places that figure in her family history. Like Patrice, the girl lives in America but has family roots in multiple parts of the world.   The girl’s mother then shares bedtime stories about these special places.

The Talk by Alicia D. Williams. The Talk tells the story of Jay, a young Black boy who is growing up in an American city with his tight-knit family and his regular group of neighborhood friends. At first, Jay is more or less oblivious to the realities of racial prejudice, but as he matures, his parents and grandparents take him aside and talk to him about how to respond to racial profiling and other forms of prejudice that Black children, especially Black boys, often encounter when they make the transition from childhood to pre-adolescence. The Talk is a book about racism, but at its core, it is a celebration of a loving Black family.

THERE ARE MORE THAN TWELVE

The twelve books mentioned above are by no means the only books that Charlotte-area writers published in 2022.  I could mention many more books, including a number of excellent scholarly works written by professors I know at UNC Charlotte.  Still, this list provides a good sampling of the wide variety of books that came out of Storied Charlotte in 2022.