UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA BEAUFORT
2013-2014 USCB Lunch With Author Series The USCB Lunch With Author Series features a great mix of NY Times best-selling authors and national award winning authors alongside debuting authors to maintain our commitment to comingle the famous and yet-to-befamous. All luncheons begin at noon but allow time for parking. Each luncheon is $42 all-inclusive. The full series is $270 and entitles you to the same discount (8%) on all ‘special luncheons’ as well as a. “series card” with the luncheon schedule printed on it. Again there are no tickets, but a master list at each luncheon so please check in upon arrival. Please be aware that there are no refunds available but you can sell or give your reservation to a friend if you can’t come. Reservations are necessary and can be made by calling 843-521-4147 or email kingsley@uscb.edu. Visa, Mastercard and Discover credit cards are accepted. Confirmation of purchase and directions to each luncheon will be made by email so please include your email address. Checks should be made out and mailed to: USCB Continuing Education, 801 Carteret St., Beaufort, SC 29902. Finally, we must appreciate the fact that publishers send authors on tour to give them an opportunity to meet their readers, but most importantly to sell books and have those sales reported to the NY Times. The main reason the series is able to provide the high caliber of authors that it does is because books are bought at the luncheons. That’s another reason I think y’all are the greatest. Thanks much.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Dataw Country Club, Carolina Room, Beaufort
The first time we have a western novel it’s with New York Times bestselling author, Craig Johnson, whose eight novels in the Walt Longmire mystery series returned to the A&E Network Summer Drama this May after a very successful grand opening the summer of 2012. The show averaged 4.0 million total viewers. The book launch is here in October. Spirit of Steamboat is a holiday tale that opens with Sheriff Walt Longmire reading A Christmas Carol in his office on December 24th when he’s interrupted by the ghost of Christmas Past: a young woman with a hairline scar across her forehead and more than a few questions about Walt’s predecessor, Lucian Connally. Walt doesn’t recognize the mystery woman, but she seems to know him and thus begins her story that takes them back to Christmas Eve, 1988 when three people died in a terrible crash. Although I called his books ‘westerns,’ one of his books, Hell Is Empty, was selected by Library Journal as the Best Mystery of the Year. Craig says his books are “westerns only in the sense that they’re novels set in the American West, but I try to deal with the universal imperative of the human condition. I love and live in the West, but there’s a lot of baggage that goes along with writing contemporary western fiction. Instead of falling into the ruts, I try to take it down the road less traveled.” Craig lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population 25.
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Sea Pines Country Club, Hilton Head Island
Hurray! Mary Kay Andrews brings us Christmas Bliss, a holiday novella reuniting us with Weezie Foley, Savannah antique dealer extraordinaire. Christmas is coming, but Weezie is doubly distracted—both by her upcoming wedding to her longtime love, chef Daniel Stipanek and also by the fact that her best friend and maid-of-honor BeBe Loudermilk is due to give birth any day—and is still adamantly refusing to marry her live-in-love Harry. You’ll remember all these characters in Mary Kay’s three previous Savannah novels: Savannah Blues, Savannah Breeze, and Blue Christmas. A native of St. Petersburg, Florida (and a diplomat of the Maas Bros. Department Store School of Charm), Mary Kay started her professional journalism career in Savannah, Georgia, where she covered the real-life murder trials which were the basis of John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. As a lifelong “junker,” she claims to know the location of every promising thrift store, flea market and junkpile in the Southeastern United States, plus many parts of Ohio. Her website gives a detailed account of the renovations and furnishing of her Tybee island refuge, Ebbtide. Look it up, you can rent it. Mary Kay is The New York Times bestselling author of Ladies’ Night, Spring Fever, Summer Rental, The Fixer Upper, Deep Dish, Hissy Fit, and Little Bitty Lies. Home is Atlanta, Georgia.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Moss Creek Clubhouse, Hilton Head
Clay Rice, one of the foremost silhouette artists in the world and grandson of legendary silhouette artist, Carew Rice, will bring his own unique style of Christmas cheer to the luncheon. With his guitar in hand, he will serenade us with some of his original songs. With his magic scissors, he will make a silhouette of you to be placed in his latest book, Mama, Let’s Make a Moon or his earlier book, The Lonely Shadow. The ‘moon’ book is completely illustrated with his silhouette art and creates a beautifully poetic story about a humble mountain family who decide to make a moon from the materials they have available to them. Together with the mountain animals, they create the moon, roll it up the mountain, and hang it in the sky for all to see and enjoy. In The Lonely Shadow, another silhouette art masterpiece, Clay weaves a wonderful tale about a small shadow who has lost his boy and goes in search of him. The shadow sings “I have no you and you have no me, you and me we have no we, but if I find you and you find me, happy we will always be.”
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Belfair Clubhouse, Bluffton
At last – the fourth and final book of the Tradd Street Mysteries!!! And the reason Karen White is returning two consecutive years which no other author has done! And yes, I confess I’m guilty. I want to know if Melanie and Jack Trenholm ever get together. Call me a romantic. And, unfortunately, as I’m writing this in June, there’s not much out there about the book except the cover. Meanwhile, read her June blockbuster, The Time Between. Not a mystery, but a beautiful book about two generations of sisters, their secrets, their resolutions. It’s all based on Edisto Island, lush with sweet grass and salt marshes. Deep down, Karen is a Southerner even though she grew up in London. The author's parents are both Mississippi natives. The family traveled the world because of her father's work with Exxon. Summers were spent visiting relatives in a small town in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. She didn't notice it at the time, but she was getting schooled in Southern life. Karen writes what she calls ‘grit lit,’ stories of Southern women typically coming of age or at a crossroads in their lives.
Monday, February 17, 2014
Champions Ballroom at Seapines Conference Center, Hilton Head
USAToday, in a 2013 cover story, credits Nancy Horan’s New York Times bestselling novel Loving Frank— about Frank Lloyd Wright and his lover, Mamah Borthwick Cheney—with launching a genre. Named one of the best books of 2007 by the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Loving Frank was a runaway favorite with critics, booksellers and readers across the country. As the Dallas Morning News put it, “Having read Loving Frank, I’ll never see anything by Frank Lloyd Wright without thinking of Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Such is the alchemy of the nearly flawless historical fiction that debut novelist Nancy Horan achieves.” With over a million copies of Loving Frank sold, anticipation is high for Nancy’s new work of historical fiction. Under the Wide and Starry Sky offers a fresh twist on the genre and forever changes our view of the author of such classics as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Nancy evocatively re-creates the passionate and powerful love story of Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson and his intrepid American wife Fanny Van de Grift Osborne, a divorcee ten years his senior and an artist in her own right who played a key role in his career. Ranging from the artists’ colonies of Europe and the mining camps of Nevada to the shores of Polynesia, Nancy invites us to explore the Stevensons’ unusual relationship and the ways in which they changed the literary and artistic landscape around them. Members of their inner circle included John Singer Sargent and Henry James.
Thursday, March 6, 2014
Hampton Hall Clubhouse, Bluffton, SC
March brings a change of pace with two authors of different genres and yet so closely related they make a major impact. New York Times bestselling author Beverly Donofrio writes memoirs, most notably, Riding in Cars with Boys, and now the story of her rape at age 55, Astonished: A Story of Evil, Blessings, Grace, and Solace. Beverly’s story is the journey of facing such a personal evil and dealing with life after the fact. I was going to paraphrase the article about Beverly’s ordeal that was in Oprah’s O, but decided instead to give you the website. http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Beverly-Donofrio-EssaySurviving-Painful-Things. Wistfully, Beverly says, “I am back in the world now, a changed woman, feisty again, a little bit wiser, a tiny bit kinder.” Internationally acclaimed author Corban Addison’s novels cover human trafficking in A Walk Across the Sun and condemn gender-based violence in The Garden of Burning Sand to be published Spring, 2014. In researching A Walk Across the Sun, he traveled to India and spent a month with a team of investigators, attorneys, and social workers from the International Justice Mission. During his visit, he went undercover into the brothels of Mumbai and met trafficking victims face to face. In The Garden of Burning Sand, Corban addresses violence against women and girls in Southern Africa and the United States. In researching the book, he spent time with activists, lawyers, doctors, and social workers in Zambia, South Africa, and Washington, D.C. Corban reminds us that gender-based violence is too common. As he said, “Beverly’s own testimony will beautifully reinforce the point: Gender-based violence is a global problem, a human problem, that all of us have a moral obligation to confront in our communities, neighborhoods, and families.”
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Sea Pines Country Club, Hilton Head Island
Hopefully most of you have read Mary Alice Monroe’s The Summer Girls, which is the first book of The Lowcountry Summer Trilogy set on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. It’s the story of a grandmother who brings her three granddaughters, who are half-sisters, to her seaside summer house for three months. When the girls were teens, they visited her regularly, now they’re grown, scattered across the country and have very infrequent reunions. In April, Mary Alice will talk about the second book, The Summer Wind. In this novel the Muir sisters continue their summer at Mamaw's historic lowcountry home, Sea Breeze. Dora, the southern good wife, starts breaking a few of her rigid rules. Carson pursues the dolphin Delphine to find love, and Harper begins to explore the landscape of Sullivan's Island and her heart. While overseeing the young women, Mamaw and her faithful housekeeper Lucille face difficult decisions for themselves and for Sea Breeze. Mary Alice has several new publications this season: A new children’s book, A Butterfly Called Hope, in September and The Summer Girls mass market release in April, 2014. We’ll have all at the luncheon.