Search results for ""Hub City Press""

On Common Ground: The Public Art of Spartanburg features 120 pages of images by local photographer Carroll Foster capturing outdoor works on side streets to college campuses, from public parks to river banks, from corporate headquarters to art centers. In the pages of this collection we also meet the sculptors, the mural painters, and the metal artists who produced this remarkable collection of public art. Some are native to our city; others work in studios farther afield. Here they share the diverse stories of their artwork—their inspirations, their passions, and their processes. On Common Ground, produced in collaboration with the Johnson Collection, is a vibrant calling card for the robust cultural life of Spartanburg. It is a moment in time in a city on the move, a snapshot of our community’s eclectic art collection in 2015.

Read more less

Rooted in places like Watauga County, Goshen Creek, and Dismal Mountain, the poems in Ron Rash’s fourth collection, Waking, electrify dry counties and tobacco fields until they sparkle with the rituals and traditions of Southerners in the stir of their lives. In his first book of poetry in nearly a decade, Rash leads his readers on a Southern odyssey, full of a terse wit and a sense of the narrative so authentic it will dazzle you. As we wake inside these poems, we see rivers wild with trout, lightning storms, and homemade churches, nailed and leaning against the side of a Tennessee mountain. A two-time PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist, Rash has been compared to writers like John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy. With his eye for the perfect detail and an ear for regional idiom, Rash furthers his claim as the new torchbearer for literature in the American South. Here is a book full of sorrow and redemption, sparseness and the beauty of a single, stark detail—the muskellunge at first light, a barn choked with curing tobacco, a porch full of men and the rockers that move them over the same spot until they carve their names into the ground, deeper, even, into the roots where myths start, into the very marrow of the world.

Read more less

A wrecker operator with a hardened heart spends Christmas on the icy interstate and unexpectedly lends a hand in a holiday miracle. A fisherman struggling with the death of his wife plants a memorial to her in a special place. A family on the edge of financial ruin unloads its prized possessions at a Christmas yard sale only to have a mysterious, bow-tied stranger answer their prayers. Meet these characters and more in this cozy collection of contemporary holiday stories, Comfort & Joy. Set in the Carolinas -- from the southern Blue Ridge Mountains to the sea islands of the Lowcountry -- these tales reverberate with the homespun style of a classic storyteller, Kirk Neely, pastor of Morningside Baptist Church in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Neely's ode to the redemptive power of Christmas harks back to O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi." Along the way he introduces us to Sara Williams, a young woman who carries the family legacy of sweetgrass basket making but whose life has gone off track into drugs and prostitution. In the story "Joe's Tree" we follow a Christmas tree on a miraculous journey from a child's grave to a frat house to children's shelter. And together with schoolteacher Mary Alice McCall we learn how slaves once used handmade quilts as a beacon of hope. Comfort & Joy, beautifully illustrated by June Neely Kern, is a book of unforgettable characters and images. The Hub City Writers Project proudly presents these stories as a Christmas gift to readers in our own community and beyond. Enjoy!

Read more less

Racine's took him to the Library of Congress and the National Archives and to the homes and offices of many citizens of Spartanburg. Inside the pages of this book are the images of world-renowned photographers Dorothea Lange and Jack Delano and local professionals Alfred T. Willis, Harry White and others. There is a gallery of Spartanburg's mighty men and influential women, her colorful characters and earnest faces, her children at play and citizens at work. There are construction projects and demolitions, local triumphs and tragedies, boom years and hard times. Seeing Spartanburg traces Spartanburg's history from its beginnings during the Colonial period, through the boom years of the early twentieth century and the hard days of war and depression, to the dynamic growth of the present era. Filled with images that are often poignant, sometimes surprising, and always rewarding, Seeing Spartanburg is a visual record of the life of one Southern city.

Read more less

All Of Us Together In The End is a lyrical examination of transformation after loss, by a writer the New York Times calls "irresistible" and "utterly convincing."Vollmer’s family memoir shimmers with wonder and enchantment and begins with the death of his mother from early-onset Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Soon after, flashing lights and floating orbs appear in the woods surrounding his family’s home in rural North Carolina, where his widowed father lives. Formative memories of having been raised in the Seventh-day Adventist church resurge in Vollmer’s mind, hastening self-reexamination and reckoning.He corresponds with a retired geology professor about “ghost lights,” which supposedly occur more in North Carolina than any other American state. He scrolls TikTok. He contacts an eccentric shaman who lives in Spain to have transcendental psychotherapy administered over Zoom. And then Jolene emerges, a woman endeared for decades to Vollmer’s father, holding secrets to their family’s past.Amidst the turmoil and loneliness of the pandemic, All of Us Together in the End is a poignant and often humorous investigation into belief set in a time where it seems people will believe anything. It is an elegiac affirmation of the awesome, strange, otherworldly ways our loved ones remain alive to us, even when they are out of reach.

Read more less

Thirty stories, collected in one volume for the very first time, from one of the South's best known and most acclaimed short story writers. With his signature darkly acerbic and sharp-witted humor, George Singleton has built a reputation as one of the most astute and wise observers of the South. Now Tom Franklin introduces this master of the form with a compilation of acclaimed and prize-winning short fiction spanning twenty years and eight collections, including stories originally published in outlets like the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Playboy, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, and many more. A lovelorn and chatty euthanasia vet arrives at a couples’ house to put down their dog, Probate; a father-to-be searches his workplace—a bar—for a replacement sonogram after recording an episode of Bonanza over the original; an unlikely romance sparks between a librarian and a professional bowler while they compete to win an RV; a father takes his son to visit the many ex-girlfriends that could have been his mother. These stories bear the influence of Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver, at other times Lewis Nordan and Donald Barthelme, and touch on the mysteries of childhood, the complexities of human relationships, and the absurdity of everyday life, its inexorable defeats and small triumphs. Assembled here for the very first time, You Want More showcases the body of work, hilarious and incisive, that has cemented George Singleton’s place among the South’s greatest living writers.

Read more less

O, The Oprah Magazine's Best Books of the SummerLonglisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel PrizeSet in contemporary Louisville, Leesa Cross-Smith’s mesmerizing first novel surrounding the death of a police officer is a requiem for marriage, friendship and family, from an author Roxane Gay has called “a consummate storyteller.”One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2018: Entertainment Weekly, Southern Living, Harper's BAZAAR, The Millions, Electric Lit, Book Riot, BookBub, Chicago Review of Books, POPSUGAR, Refinery29, NYLON, and SheReadsEvi—a classically-trained ballerina—was nine months pregnant when her husband Eamon was killed in the line of duty on a steamy morning in July. Now, it is winter, and Eamon's adopted brother Dalton has moved in to help her raise six-month-old Noah.Whiskey & Ribbons is told in three intertwining, melodic voices: Evi in present day, as she’s snowed in with Dalton during a freak blizzard; Eamon before his murder, as he prepares for impending fatherhood and grapples with the danger of his profession; and Dalton, as he struggles to make sense of his life next to Eamon’s, and as he decides to track down the biological father he’s never known.In the vein of Jojo Moyes’ After You, Whiskey & Ribbons explores the life that continues beyond loss, with a complicated brotherly dynamic reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout’s The Burgess Boys. It’s a meditation on grief, hope, motherhood, brotherhood and surrogate fatherhood. Above all, it’s a novel about what it means—and whether it’s possible—to heal.

Read more less

South Carolina is a state of incredible African American history: from the lunch counter in Rock Hill where the Friendship Nine began their "Jail, No Bail" protests, to the site where the freedom song "We Shall Overcome" was first sung; our nation’s very first school for the formerly enslaved, to a monument to the Middle Passage championed by Toni Morrison. Visitors and residents alike will find the Palmetto State rich in remarkable places that played a part in some of our nation’s most significant moments. The Green Book of South Carolina, compiled by the WeGOJA Foundation (on behalf of the SC African American Heritage Commission), is a first-of-its-kind travel guide to the most tourist-friendly destinations offering visitors avenues to discover intriguing African American history as they travel the state.Organized by region and illustrated with more than 80 color photographs by Joshua Parks, this guidebook presents a curated selection of over 200 museums, monuments, historic markers, schools, churches, and other public lands. Features a foreword by Dr. Darlene Clark Hine, Distinguished Professor Emerita at Michigan State University where she served as the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of History. The South Carolina Green Book is a collaborative release by Hub City Press, the WeGOJA Foundation, and the International African American Museum. Sponsored by the City of Spartanburg.FEATURES More than 180 historic markers, structures, and landmarks for a diverse audience Includes popular sites as well as hidden gems Organized by region for easy travel planning and discovery. Includes suggested day trips for each region. Compact accessibly-priced book Beautiful full-color photography

Read more less

From debut novelist Maris Lawyer, The Blue Line Down is a breakneck tale of betrayal, loyalty, and unexpected homecoming. Jude Washer wants to run: away from the coal mines where he is destined to work, away from his father’s abuse of his little brother, away from the prison-like confines of his village. Whispers of unionizing ripple through the small West Virginia mining town. When the mines take Jude’s brother away from him, Jude takes matters into his own hands. With nowhere else to go, Jude joins the Baldwin-Felts Agency, a band of violent men dedicated to stamping out unionizers across the mountains. It is 1922, and the Baldwin-Felts are poised to raid a mining town in Virginia. When the coal miners fight back against the agents, Jude, now twenty-four, and Harvey, a new recruit, take an opportunity to flee amid the bloodshed. With the Baldwin-Felts on their tail, Jude and an injured Harvey make their way down the mountains, where they are intercepted in South Carolina by a ragtag gang of bootleggers who put them to work to pay off a debt. Jude is desperate for a place to call home, but can he find it in these hardscrabble hills among strangers?

Read more less

In her debut collection, Tiana Nobile grapples with the history of transnational adoption, both her own from South Korea and the broader, collective experience. In conversation with psychologist Harry Harlow’s monkey experiments and utilizing fragments of a highly personal cache of documents from her own adoption, these poems explore dislocation, familial relationships, and the science of love and attachment. A Rona Jaffe Foundation award winner, Nobile is a glimmering new talent. Cleave attempts to unknot the complexities of adoptee childhood, revealing a nature of opposites—”the child cleaved to her mother / the child cleaved from her mother”—while reckoning with the histories that make us. Abstract Foster Mother The first time I belonged to a woman, my body a fresh bulb broken off at the root. She kept me for six months, watched spit bubble from my pursed lips. I wonder if she ever claimed me, if she rocked me to sleep on her chest, if she wiped my mouth gently saying, There you go, there you are.

Read more less

This full color book details fifty iconic stories in the twenty-five year history of the Hub City Writers Project, founded in 1995 in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Each includes a double page illustrated spread. The book features short essays by local and regional writers about moments like the Lawson’s Fork Festival in 2000, the Out Loud campaign against academic censorship, all the way to the introduction of our signature event, Delicious Reads. This book celebrates the first twenty-five years and details how the Hub City Writers Project grew from an idea hatched in a downtown coffee shop among three local writers to now being one of the South’s most robust literary organizations.

Read more less

Late one night at the end of a scorching summer, a phone call rouses Sheriff Furman Chambers out of bed. Two men have been shot dead on Highway 9 in front of the Hillside Inn, a one-time boardinghouse that is now just a front for Larthan Tull’s liquor business. When Sheriff Chambers arrives to investigate, witnesses say a man named Mary Jane Hopewell walked into the tavern, dragged two of Tull’s runners into the street, and laid them out with a shotgun. Sheriff Chambers’s investigation leads him into the Bell village, where Mary Jane’s family lives a quiet, hardscrabble life of working in the cotton mill. While the weary sheriff digs into the mystery and confronts the county’s underground liquor operation, the whiskey baron himself is looking for vengeance. Mary Jane has gotten in the way of his business, and you don’t do that to Larthan Tull and get away with it. Hailed as a “grand new talent” (Bret Lott) and a “significant new voice in Southern fiction” (Ron Rash), Jon Sealy has written a haunting debut novel. With its unforgettable characters and evocative setting, The Whiskey Baron is a gripping drama about family ties and bad choices, about the folly of power and the limitations of the law.

Read more less

These stories, all set in nearby towns in the Alabama Black Belt—a swath of dark soil that runs west to east through the central part of the state—explore the history, culture, and human spirit of the people who live there, and those that came before them and were shaped by the same rich and corrupted geography. In the title story a teenage girl wants desperately to escape her self-destructive mother and comes to realize the hay bale art she can see from their house may hold a key to her future, if she can divine it. The novella “Playing War” tells the story of a wife who’s just learned the hunting accident her husband was involved in years earlier was not exactly an accident. “Haints at Noon,” written in the form of a 1930s slave narrative, tells the story of a couple trying to endure that “peculiar institution.” Another story, “Into Silence,” which was included in Best American Short Stories 2010, gives voice to a woman who is deaf and mute as she tries to break the bonds of her domineering mother when a traveling photographer, working for the WPA, rents a room in their home. The past and present are joined here in stories that demonstrate the never-ending struggle for understanding and connection.

Read more less

The poems in Pantry take their titles from kitchen objects. Some objects are common to most kitchens, like dishwashers and double boilers, and others are less common, like pie birds and olive pitters. The poems are not literally about these objects. Rather, the objects, or some aspect of them—a shape, a use, some minute detail—are landmarks in an interior domestic landscape. And few domestic landscapes are more interior than the pantry, a place where objects are laid aside for later use, sometimes years later or not at all. These are the things we hold onto, forget, and discover again. They are the things underlying our material lives. The poems in this book begin here, in the closely packed pantry, but then slip beneath the material objects to explore the domestic lives that spark, seethe, and sometimes explode around them. "In Pantry, Lilah Hegnauer exalts kitchen articles and utensils, their graspable measure of handles, solidity of copper, the comparative impermanence of their bodies in relation to ours," says D.A. Powell, recipient of the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Prize in Poetry. "Like Stein and Ponge, Hegnauer uncovers the magical—and tremendously affecting—life of objects in each crenature, joint and flange.” "Pantry is no Food Network test kitchen, no fusty closet of canned goods," says Lisa Spaar, author of Vanitas, Rough. "Erotic, witty, smart, playful, these poems make the quotidian realm of objects an occasion for wooing, meditation, and praise. Think of the Gertrude Stein of Tender Button meeting Emily Dickinson (“Vesuvius at Home”) in a throw-down match where what’s at stake is the veracity and voracity of female desire, and you’ll have a sense of the spell cast by this intoxicating wunderkammer of a book.”

Read more less

Jimmy Buffet has his "Coconut Telegraph," but he's got nothing on nature writer John Lane, who sends his musings into the world each week in a popular newspaper column named after the ubiquitous green vine that's swallowing the South. Lane is a champion of the underdog, and what he seeks to protect is the character and the beauty of the place he lives. Lane, a much published poet and essayist, is a soldier for sustainability and a warrior for wildness. Using both wit and wisdom he takes on the environmental issues of our times, often by simply taking us on a walk through the woods or a drive up the highway. Just when he seems to write best about animals in his South Carolina Upcountry backyard-deer, tree frogs, and, yes, coyotes-he captivates us with a river adventure. He writes with as much intensity about old maps or a favorite pickup truck as he does about the socio-political issues that concern him-land use, urban planning, and conservation. These four dozen short essays, published by Community Journals in upstate South Carolina, will make you look more closely at the world around you and also, Lane hopes, will make you look ahead: to take actions, large and small, to protect the place you live.

Read more less

The poets include: Paul Allen, Jan Bailey, Cathy Smith Bowers, Jessica Bundschuh, Stephen Corey, Robert Cumming, Debra Daniel, Carol Ann Davis, Curtis Derrick, Linda Ferguson, Starkey Flythe, Angela Kelly, John Lane, Susan Ludvigson, Terri McCord, John Ower, Ron Rash, Paul Rice, Warren Slesinger, and Kathleen Whitten. Each has won a Poetry Fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission during the period 1977-2004. The book's introduction is written by editor Kwame Dawes, poet-in-residence at the University of South Carolina and director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative, a statewide organization that promotes and celebrates the reading, writing, and performing of poetry across South Carolina.

Read more less

Shortly before daybreak in War, West Virginia, a passing train derails and spills an avalanche of coal over sixteen-year-old Emma Palmisano’s house, trapping her sleeping family inside. The year is 1924, and the remote mines of Appalachia have filled with families like Emma’s—poor, immigrant laborers building new lives half a world away from the island of Sicily. Emma awakes in total darkness, to the voice of a railroad man, Caleb Sypher, who is digging her out from the suffocating coal. From his pocket he removes two spotless handkerchiefs and tenderly cleans Emma’s bare feet. Though she knows little else about this railroad man, Emma marries him a week later, and Caleb delivers her from the gritty coal camp to thirty-four acres of pristine Virginia mountain farmland. Winner of the South Carolina First Novel Prize in 2012, In the Garden of Stone is a multi-generational tale about the nature of power and pride, love and loss, and how one impoverished family endures estrangement from their land and each other in order to unearth the rich seams of forgiveness. Emma gives birth to a son, Dean, but the family’s life is shattered by a hobo’s bullet at the railroad station; the boy grows up early, becoming a remote man with fierce and unpredictable loyalties. Dean’s daughter, Hannah, forsakes her heritage and wanders far from home, in the end reconnecting with the Sypher family in the wildest place of all, the human heart. Bleak, harrowing, and beautifully told, In the Garden of Stone, is a haunting saga of endurance and redemption.

Read more less

Set amid the perils of illegal border crossings, The Iguana Tree is the suspenseful saga of Lilia and Hector, who separately make their way from Mexico into the United States, seeking work in the Carolinas and a home for their infant daughter. Michel Stone s harrowing novel meticulously examines the obstacles each faces in pursuing a new life: manipulation, rape, and murder in the perilous commerce of border crossings; betrayal by family and friends; exploitation by corrupt officials and rapacious landowners on the U.S. side; and, finally, the inexorable workings of the U.S. justice system. Hector and Lilia meet Americans willing to help them with legal assistance and offers of responsible employment, but their illegal entry seems certain to prove their undoing. The consequences of their decisions are devastating. In the end, The Iguana Tree is a universal story of loss, grief, and human dignity.

Read more less

In El Rey of Gold Teeth, Reyes Ramirez explores living in America as a first-generation American of Salvadoran and Mexican descent, living among conflicting histories. Through the voices of an astronaut, a tennis player, a drag queen, family members, an alternate version of the self, and even a turtle, these propulsive poems embody the many marginalized voices demanding to be remembered in a nation that requires erasure of histories. Colonizing languages and subverting forms, rerouting histories, and finding the mundane made extraordinary, El Rey of Gold Teeth breaks open notions of destiny, in humorous and devastating ways, to reimagine the past and present a new future where lack transforms to abundance, where there will be many answers to every question. Reyes Ramirez’s debut poetry collection plays in spaces of both elegy and joy, and introduces a vibrant new talent.

Read more less

Part coming-of-age summer romance, part thriller, Bomb Island is a funny and fast-paced Southern novel exploring subculture communities, survival, and found family set on an island near an unexploded atomic bomb. Summer is in full swing on Bomb Island, Georgia. Fifteen-year-old Fish lives in a commune on the three-mile stretch of sand with his chosen family: their “mother-sage” Whistle and her white tiger, Sugar, a young man named Reef, and an old man named Nutzo, who is still missing. Fish and Whistle spend the days leading tours in their glass bottom boat out to the barrier island’s namesake, an unexploded atomic bomb.  This is the summer when Fish meets Celia, the tattooed daughter of a troublesome local charter fisherman bent on exposing Whistle’s commune—and their illegal tiger. When a party at her dad’s place goes sour, Fish brings Celia back to Bomb Island in the hope that she

Read more less

A short story collection exploring the bounds of contemporary family and how we move forward in a world so often changed by loss.Lauded by Kevin Wilson as “an exceptional collection that introduces us to an exciting new voice,” The Great American Everything orbits the experiences of relationships, be it brother-to-brother, sister-to-sister, patient-to-caregiver. Rendered with tenderness and a keen eye, these ten stories cut into the ways families approach questions of aging, adoption, loss, and class. A young woman hired to provide accompaniment services to an elder confronts the borders of complicity and friendship; two brothers search for details of their recently deceased grandfather in the desert; a college student faces her friend’s abuser during a door-to-door fundraising campaign.For fans of Amy Hempel and Rick Moody, these stories, spread over varied landscapes of the South from Memphis to New Orleans, contend with the ways in which the places we live dictate the way we trust and protect our own. Scott Gloden has assembled a precise and moving collection that considers what makes a family, however makeshift or impromptu its design.Scott Gloden is the winner of the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize.

Read more less

From the award-winning author of Over the Plain Houses comes a major novel about two young women contending with unplanned pregnancies in different eras.Edie Carrigan didn't plan to "get herself" pregnant, much less end up in a home for unwed mothers. In 1950s North Carolina, illegitimate pregnancy is kept secret, wayward women require psychiatric cures, and adoption is always the best solution. Not even Edie’s closest friend, Luce Waddell, understands what Edie truly wants: to keep and raise the baby.Twenty-five years later, Luce is a successful lawyer, and her daughter Meera now faces the same decision Edie once did. Like Luce, Meera is fiercely independent and plans to handle her unexpected pregnancy herself. Along the way, Meera finds startling secrets about her mother’s past, including the long-ago friendship with Edie. As the three women’s lives intertwine and collide, the story circles age-old questions about female awakening, reproductive choice, motherhood, adoption, sex, and missed connections.For fans of Brit Bennett's The Mothers and Jennifer Weiner's Mrs. Everything, The Say So is a timely novel that asks: how do we contend with the rippling effects of the choices we've made? With equal parts precision and tenderness, Franks has crafted a sweeping epic about the coming of age of the women’s movement that reverberates through the present day.

Read more less

Winner of the Thomas Wolfe Award2023 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award FinalistGeorge Masa's Wild Vision recounts the incredible, overlooked life of the photographer George Masa.Self-taught photographer George Masa (born Masahara Iizuka in Osaka, Japan), arrived in Asheville, North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century amid a period of great transition in the southern Appalachians.Masa's photographs from the 1920s and early 1930s are stunning windows into an era where railroads hauled out the remaining old-growth timber with impunity, new roads were blasted into hillsides, and an activist community emerged to fight for a new national park. Masa began photographing the nearby mountains and helping to map the Appalachian Trail, capturing this transition like no other photographer of his time. His images, along with his knowledge of the landscape, became a critical piece of the argument for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, compelling John D. Rockefeller to donate $5 million for initial land purchases. Despite being hailed as the “Ansel Adams of the Smokies,” Masa died, destitute and unknown, in 1933.In George Masa’s Wild Vision: A Japanese Immigrant Imagines Western North Carolina, poet and environmental organizer Brent Martin explores the locations Masa visited, using first-person narratives to contrast, lament, and exalt the condition of the landscape the photographer so loved and worked to interpret and protect. The book includes seventy-five of Masa’s photographs, accompanied by Martin’s reflections on Masa’s life and work.

Read more less