Malaprop’s is pleased to partner with host Congregation Beth Israel and the Rosenwald Collaborative to present this hybrid event with Andrew Feiler.

There is an option to attend virtually and a limited number of seats are available to attend in person at Congregation Beth Israel. Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance. 

• Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.
• Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event. Masks are encouraged but not required for the in-person audience at Congregation Beth Israel.

Andrew Feiler is a photographer and author and a fifth generation Georgian. Having grown up Jewish in  Savannah, he has been shaped by the rich complexities of the American South. Feiler has long been active in civic life. He has helped create over a dozen community initiatives, serves on multiple not-for-profit boards, and is an active advisor to numerous elected officials and political candidates. His art is an extension of his civic values.

Feiler’s newest book of photography, A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T.  Washington, and the 4,978 Schools that Changed America, was recently published by the University of Georgia Press. This work is the first comprehensive photodocumentary of the program created by Tuskegee Institute principal Booker T. Washington and Sears, Roebuck & Company president Julius Rosenwald. From 1912 to 1937, this collaboration built 4,978 schools for African American children across 15 southern and border states and transformed America.

Feiler’s Rosenwald school images have received a number of early honors. Photolucida named them a 2020 Top 50 portfolio and Photoville selected them for “The Fence,” an outdoor exhibition displayed  internationally in eleven cities. They were also part of the Currents 2020 exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. The solo exhibition of this work is now on tour and is on view  at the Charlotte Museum of History in Charlotte, January 15, 2022 – June 18, 2022.

Feiler’s earlier book, Without Regard to Sex, Race, or Color, was also published by the University of  Georgia Press. Focused on the largely abandoned campus of an historically black college, this body of artistic documentary photography offers a new way into the debate raging in our society about the  essential role education has played as the foundation of the American Dream.

Feiler’s photographs have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, Slate, Architect, Preservation, Eye on Photography, Lenscratch, Oxford American, The Bitter Southerner, The Forward, numerous other magazines and newspapers, and on CBS News and NPR. His work has been displayed in galleries and museums including solo exhibitions at such venues as the National Civil Rights Museum at  the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, and International  Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro, NC. His work is in public and private collections including that of Atlanta University Center and Emory University.

Feiler earned his bachelor’s in economics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a master’s in modern history from Oxford University and a master’s in business  administration from Stanford University. Feiler’s work can be seen at andrewfeiler.com.

UPDATE: This will be a fully virtual event. Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

If you decide to attend and purchase the authors’ books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

All seventeen-year-old Maggie Warshauer wants is to leave her stifled life in Filliyaw Creek behind and head to college. An outsider at school and uncertain of her own sexual identity, Maggie longs to start again somewhere new. Inspired by a long-dead biologist’s journals, scientific-minded Maggie spends her days sailing, exploring, and categorizing life around her. But when her beautiful cousin Charisse disappears on prom night and is found dead at the marina where Maggie lives, Maggie’s plans begin to unravel. A mysterious stranger begins stalking her and a local detective on the case leaves her struggling to hold on to her secrets—her father’s alcoholism, her mother’s abandonment, a boyfriend who may or may not exist, and her own actions on prom night. As the detective gets closer to finding the truth, and Maggie’s stalker is closing in, she is forced to come to terms with the one person who might hold the answers—herself.

A former farmer, sailor, and journalist, Valerie Nieman is the author of five novels, one short story collection, three collections of poetry, and two poetry chapbooks. To the Bones, her genre-bending novel about Appalachia published by West Virginia University Press in 2019, was a finalist for the Manly Wade Wellman Award and the Killer Nashville Award. Her work has appeared in dozens of journals including Monkeybicycle, StorySouth, and The Georgia Review and received fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and the NEA, among others. Nieman recently retired from teaching at North Carolina A&T. Learn more at valnieman.com.

Jamie Mason was born in Oklahoma City and grew up in Washington, DC. She’s most often reading and writing, but in the life left over, she enjoys films, Formula 1 racing, football, traveling, and, conversely, staying at home. Jamie lives with her husband and two daughters in the mountains of western North Carolina. She is the author of Three Graves Full, Monday’s Lie, and The Hidden Things.

This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually and a limited amount of seats available to attend the event in-store. Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.

Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event. Note the important event details on the RSVP form.

If you decide to attend and purchase the authors’ books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

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.

Brent Martin is the author of three chapbook collections of poetry and of The Changing Blue Ridge Mountains: Essays on Journeys Past and Present. His poetry and essays have been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, Pisgah Review, Tar River Poetry, Chattahoochee Review, Eno Journal, New Southerner, Kudzu Literary Journal, Smoky Mountain News and elsewhere. He lives in the Cowee community in Western North Carolina, where he and his wife, Angela Faye Martin, run Alarka Institute.

The Foodie Book Club is a club about food writing. The club meets on the last Wednesday of every month at 7:00 PM.  Click here for details and monthly picks!

Join former Malaprop’s General Manager Linda-Marie Barrett for this woman-only book club that seeks to have fun by reading books (fiction & non) by women writers. Click here to see a full schedule of what the club is reading. Club attendees get 10% off the book at Malaprop’s!

The club meets at 6:30 P.M. on the first Tuesday of the month at the Battery Park Book Exchange. It will be held virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Join us for our monthly poetry event featuring three poets and coordinated by Mildred Barya. This month, we welcome Marlanda Dekine, Hilda Downer, and Ann Shurgin.

This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually and a limited amount of seats available to attend the event in-store. Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.

Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event.

If you decide to attend and purchase the author’s books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

Feel free to email [email protected] with questions. We look forward to seeing you, whether in-person or online!

Marlanda Dekine is the winner of the 2021 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize. Concerned with ancestry, memory, and the process of staying within one’s own body, their work leaves spells and incantations for others to follow for themselves. Dekine is a Tin House Own Path Scholar and author of the self-published collection and mixtape, i am from a punch & a kiss (2017). Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in the Poetry Out Loud Anthology, POETRY Magazine, Emergence Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. They live in South Carolina with their dog Malachi. For more, visit  https://sapientsoul.square.site

Marlanda Dekine’s debut collection, Thresh & Hold is a holy, radical unlearning and reclamation of self. What does it mean to be a Gullah-Geechee descendant from a rural place where a third of the nation’s founding wealth was harvested by trafficked West and Central Africans? Dekine’s poems travel across age and time, signaling that both the past and future exist in the present. Through erasure and persona, Dekine reimagines intergenerational traumas and calls to task narratives of modern-day museums and the Works Progress Administration. Beyond gospel music, fear, and previous generation stories, Thresh & Hold offers magic, healing, and innovative pathways to manifest intimacy.

—
Hilda Downer, a long term member of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative and North Carolina Writers Conference, has an MA in English from Appalachian State University and an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College. Retired from teaching English, she also worked as a psychiatric nurse for over 38 years. Her first book of poetry, Bandana Creek, was published by Red Clay Press. Her second book, Sky Under the Roof, by Bottom Dog Press was a Nautilus Golden Winner. She has published essays and poetry in numerous journals and anthologies. She lives in Sugar Grove, NC.
For more, visit [email protected]

We must “relearn ourselves / with what we have now,” Hilda Downer says in her new collection When Light Waits for Us. Time—in all its countless iterations and absences—bears in on her from every side, all of life an excavation site, a record of who she became and, more hauntingly, who she did not. Even so, Downer recognizes that we live in a “delicate microcosm” where “orchids [are] so specialized / their pollination requires / one particular species of insects.” Her poems assert that we are no different, our souls intersecting, thereby giving us all these ways—music, photography, even poems—to “invent an art to make it worth starting over.”

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Ann Shurgin grew up in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and holds a degree in English and journalism from East Tennessee State University. After a career in journalism and communications in Texas, she moved back home to the Appalachian Mountains. She is a member of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative and the Appalachian Studies Association. While the Whippoorwill Called is her first book of poetry.

While the Whippoorwill Called is a sensual delight rooted in laurel thicket and balsam ridge, in the amber glow of home left and returned to, a voice sometimes alone in the mountains nonetheless singing free. Ann Shurgin’s debut poetry collection is also a heart tugger, wishing for love once tasted then flowing past. Both poet and photographer, Shurgin centers us in her lens of wishing and independence, on the Tennessee/Carolina border, knowing that “a stone from Appalachia / is lost without the hollows / and the whippoorwills.” Wrap yourself in evanescent memory and life’s great unfurling, in the quiet woods of what was and is yet to be.

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Mildred Kiconco Barya is a writer and poet. She has written short-stories and essays for various publications, features and travel articles for newspapers. Her first collection of poetry titled: Men Love Chocolates But They Don’t Say won the National Award for poetry publication 2002. She is also the author of the poetry collections The Price of Memory and Give Me Room to Move My Feet. Barya is Assistant professor of Creative Writing and World Literature at University of North Carolina-Asheville. Learn more at http://mildredbarya.com/.

This event is a free event, but registration is required. Click here to register. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement. However, what may have been an impediment to the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many of those who sought to escape it. In the depths of the Dismal, thousands of maroons–people who had emancipated themselves from enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers–established new lives of freedom in a landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites.

Dismal Freedom unearths the stories of these maroons, their lives, and their struggles for liberation. Drawing from newly discovered primary sources and archeological evidence that suggests far more extensive maroon settlement than historians have previously imagined, award-winning author J. Brent Morris uncovers one of the most exciting yet neglected stories of American history. This is the story of resilient, proud, and determined people who made the Great Dismal Swamp their free home and sanctuary and who played an outsized role in undermining slavery through the Civil War.

J. Brent Morris is professor of history at the University of South Carolina Beaufort.