Featured Speakers at the 2018
Thomas Wolfe Society Conference in Charlotte
Charlotte urban historian Dr. Tom Hanchett will talk about what this Southern city was like in Wolfe’s day. Trained at Cornell, University of Chicago, and UNC Chapel Hill, Hanchett is best known for his 16 years co-creating award-winning exhibits at Levine Museum of the New South. His publications range from a history of Charlotte segregation, Sorting Out the New South City, to an essay on Southern soft drinks in Cornbread Nation: The Best of Southern Food Writing. Charlotte Magazine calls him “Charlotte’s Dr. History” and named him a 2015 Charlottean of the Year.
Wiley Cash is the author of the New York Times bestseller A Land More Kind Than Home (2012). This first novel won the Southern Independent Bookseller Alliances’ (SIBA) Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. This Dark Road to Mercy (2014) was a national bestseller and a SIBA Okra Pick. Cash’s third novel, The Last Ballad (2017), is inspired by Ella May Wiggins, balladeer and union organizer killed during the 1929 Loray Mill Strike in Gastonia, NC. A native North Carolinian, Cash lives in Wilmington, NC.
Shelby Stephenson is Poet Laureate of North Carolina. His recent books include Elegies for Small Game, winner of a Roanoke-Chowan Award, and Family Matters: Homage to July, the Slave Girl, winner of a Bellday Prize. A Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he is Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina-Pembroke, where he served as editor of Pembroke Magazine from 1979 until his retirement in 2010. He lives at the homeplace on Paul’s Hill, where he was born, near McGee’s Crossroads, about ten miles north of Benson.
