Summary_2012_2013_2

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA BEAUFORT

Lunch With Author Series 2012-2013 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’. Series purchasers receive a “series card” with the luncheon schedule printed on it. There are no refunds but you can sell or give your reservation to a friend if you can’t come. Instead of tickets, there is a master list at each luncheon so please check in upon arrival.

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.

 Thursday, October 11, 2012

Omni Resort Hilton Head Shore House

Lovers of Chocolat will be delighted to learn that Joanne Harris is opening the USCB Lunch With Author Series with Peaches for Father Francis (the American title) or Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé, (the international title). In Peaches, the characters Vianne and her daughters, Anouk, and Rosette are blown by the changing summer wind back to the picturesque village of Lansquenet eight years after the Chocolat story. In the interim they have been living in Paris in The Lollipop Shoes novel. So again we have an author who didn’t intend to write a trilogy…but her characters led the way. Lansquenet has changed little...the cobbled streets, the whitewashed church, the disused tanneries along the river – all are just as they always were. But in Les Marauds, a community of Moroccans has arisen, with women veiled in black, the scent of incense, spices, kif and mint tea, and facing the church, on the far side of the Tannes, a minaret. It’s Ramadan, August, 2010. If you remember in Chocolat the season was Lent.

On a whirlwind tour, Joanne comes to us from England, Australia, New Zealand and the Open Book Festival in Cape Town, South Africa. From us she travels to the Harbourfront International Writers’ Festival in Toronto and back to Europe. Her books (twelve novels, a collection of short stories and two cookbooks) are published in over 40 countries winning both British and international awards. Chocolat was made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Brinoche and Johnny Depp.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Dataw Country Club Carolina Room, Beaufort

Claire Cook wrote her first novel in her minivan when she was 45. At 50, she walked the red carpet at the Hollywood premiere of her second novel, Must Love Dogs, starring Diane Lane and John Cusack.

She is now the bestselling author of nine novels, including her newest, Wallflower in Bloom, about a woman who emerges from the shadow of her overbearing family and finds herself “dancing with the stars.” Deirdre Griffin has a great life; it’s just not her own. She’s the around-the-clock personal assistant to her charismatic, high maintenance, New Age guru brother, Tag. As the family wallflower, her only worth seems to be as gatekeeper to Tag at his New England seaside compound. Then Deirdre’s sometime boyfriend informs her that he is marrying another woman, who just happens to be having the baby he told Deirdre he never wanted. While drowning her sorrows in Tag’s expensive vodka, Deirdre decides to use his massive online following to get herself voted on as a last-minute Dancing with the Stars replacement. It’ll get her back in shape, mentally and physically. It might even get her a life of her own. Deirdre’s fifteen minutes of fame have begun in Wallflower in Bloom.

Claire says, “I love speaking to groups, and teaching workshops for aspiring writers and women coming into their own at midlife. I love writing novels and feel incredibly lucky to get to do it for a living -- this is the career I almost didn't have!! I love telling my story, because I think so many women (and a few good men!) have buried dreams like mine. My advice: dust them off and go for it!”

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Sea Pines Country Club, Hilton Head Island

In this long-awaited sequel to The Hunt Club, New York Times bestselling author Bret Lott returns with a literary page-turner about murder and family secrets. Though Dead Low Tide continues the story of Huger Dillard, this haunting work of fiction brilliantly stands on its own. While landing a johnboat in the marsh just off a Charleston golf community, 27-year-old college dropout Dillard and his blind father, Unc, discover a woman’s body anchored deep in the mud at water’s low tide. Their innocent expedition for some night golf quickly becomes a tense standoff among club security, the Department of Natural Resources and heavily armed sailors from the nearby Naval Weapons Station.

Which is why Lowcountry author, Pat Conroy said, “Dead Low Tide is the best book Bret has ever written. He creates a Charleston that has never been written about in the history of that remarkable city. It is a literary thriller of the highest order—like something John LeCarre would write. I couldn’t put it down.”

Bret Lott is the author of novels, Ancient Highway, A Song I Knew by Heart, Jewel (an Oprah’s Book Club selection), The Hunt Club, Reed’s Beach, A Stranger’s House, The Man Who Owned Vermont, several story collections, a memoir and a writing guide. Formerly editor of The Southern Review, he was appointed to the National Council on the Arts in 2006.

Currently, he is doing what he loves most, teaching Creative Writing at the College of Charleston.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Dockside Restaurant, Port Royal, SC

The myths of nutrition will stop haunting you when you read Robert Davis’s latest book, Coffee Is Bad good for You which is a slender, handy guide to health and diet claims. Whether it’s aspartame, high-fructose corn syrup, or gluten, Robert relies on only the best evidence to separate fact from half-truth and fiction. Robert includes a wealth of reliable references, and ends with “Ten Tips for Deciphering Diet and Nutrition Claims”, a chapter worth the price of the book.

Robert J. Davis, PhD is President and Editor-in-Chief of Everwell, an award-winning health journalist whose work has appeared on CNN, PBS, WebMD and in The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of The Healthy Skeptic: Cutting Through the Hype About Your Health. Davis holds a PhD in health policy from Brandeis University, where he was a Pew Fellow, a master's degree in public health from Emory, and an undergraduate degree from Princeton University. He also teaches at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Hampton Hall Clubhouse, Bluffton, SC

Much has happened to Karen White since last she visited the USCB Lunch With Author Series. Two of her books, The Beach Trees and The Strangers on Montagu Street debuted in the top twenty of the New York Times bestseller list. Personally, I thought both books represented Karen at her best, and was delighted the New York Times elite agreed with me.

This summer’s blockbuster, Sea Change, is set on St. Simons Island, Georgia and is a book about second chances, leaps of faith, and love.

For Ava Whalen, a whirlwind romance, marriage and a move to St. Simons Island mean a new beginning. What she doesn't realize is that her marriage will take her on an unexpected journey into the deep recesses of her past that will transform her forever. Feeling adrift, Ava throws herself into uncovering Matthew's family history and that of the island, not realizing that she has a connection of her own to this place--or that her obsession with the past could very well destroy her future.

In January, After the Rain debuts once again with a new face, edits and rewrites making for a fresh appeal. It is the sequel to Falling Home and will enchant readers with the poignant tale of a small town Walton mayor with six children who sees romance in the new girl in town even though there is a definite mystery about her. Reviewers heaped words like “character-driven and strongly written” on After the Rain.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Country Club of Hilton Head

TWO New York Times bestselling authors at one luncheon! How great is that and especially when it’s Dorothea Benton Frank and her good friend Pamela Redmond. For many of us, Dottie is the Queen of Lowcountry Literature bringing the world to the Lowcountry with her 13 bestselling novels. Dottie was raised on Sullivans Island and its magic, magnetism and repository of family strength explains why many of her characters return there as in her latest novel, Porch Lights. To quote the Charlotte Observer “Porch Lights is filled with Dorothea Benton Frank's charming wit, indelible poignancy, and hallmark themes—the bonds of family, the heart's resilience, and the strength of love.”

Pamela Redmond has authored five bestselling novels, six non-fiction books, founded three websites, co-authored ten baby-naming guides, is a columnist for Glamour magazine and a contributor to the Daily Beast and The Huffington Post. Sometimes, she sleeps, I think. Her latest novel, The Possibility of You is the story of three women whose lives intersect across generations. Geraldine Brooks described it as, “Seamlessly weaving the present with the past, as an exploration of love and family, of race and relationships that combines the best elements of a family saga with an intricate, Chinese box of a mystery story.”

Dottie and her husband Peter, with whom she says she has been married forever, have two grown children and currently divide their time between New Jersey and the Lowcountry of South Carolina.

Pamela and husband journalist Richard Satran have three adult children and live in New York City.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Moss Creek Clubhouse, Hilton Head

Heidi Julavits’ fourth novel, The Vanishers was selected BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH FOR MARCH 2012

by Amazon. I had difficulty choosing a genre for The Vanishers but resolved that lapse with reviews describing it as an “astral detective thriller”…a new genre. The Vanishers is a lot of things: a paranormal detective story, an affecting exposition of familial and female dynamics, and a hilarious satire of academic politics. According to Amazon’s Kevin Nguyen “Heidi has crafted a novel that is as ambitious as it is strange.”

After angering her jealous mentor, Julia, an up-and-coming psychic, is exiled from the Institute of Integrated Parapsychology, an elite psychic academy dubbed the Workshop. Subjected to a "psychic attack," Julia is crippled of her powers, until she receives an offer she can't refuse: to team up with her mentor's academic rival to get revenge, while seeking out a mysterious filmmaker who may have a connection to Julia's dead mother. It's a bizarre adventure that takes her to a recovery facility for victims of psychic attacks and which doubles as a spa for plastic surgery patients. The Vanishers is a truly unique, thoroughly imagined astral mystery.

Heidi is co-founder and co-editor of The Believer and author of three other novels.

She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she’s taught in the MFA programs of Columbia and Syracuse Universities and at Brooklyn College.