WILSON, N.C. — Barton College will welcome author Charles F. Price as the featured speaker for the annual Joyce T. Boone Southern Authors Series. The lecture will be held on Monday, Sept. 30, in The Sam and Marjorie Ragan Writing Center at 7:30 p.m. The program is open to the public at no charge, and the community is invited to attend.
Price has been a Washington lobbyist, management consultant, urban planner, and journalist. In 1995, after working for 19 years in the nation’s capital, he moved to Burnsville in the mountains of Western North Carolina to devote full time to writing. Price and his wife, Ruth, are the founders of Burnsville’s Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, now in its seventh year. He is also a painter, illustrator, and sculptor in clay.
His most recent work of fiction is “Four Sixes to Beat: John Wesley Hardin in El Paso,” based on the life of the West’s most feared gunman, John Wesley Hardin. “Above the Caprock, a Western,” explores a man and a boy, each damaged by loss in different ways. Another Western, “Vengeance on the Sweetgrass,” draws on true events, exploring the lynching of innocent homesteaders Emma Waldroup and Jack Antrim. “Nor the Battle to the Strong: A Novel of the American Revolution in the South” is an account of a crucial but unjustly neglected military campaign in South Carolina during the summer of 1781.
Price also wrote the “Hiwassee” Series, four works of historical fiction set in his native Western North Carolina, comprising a single narrative cycle interweaving the partly imagined private history of his 19th century ancestors with the public history of the Southern Appalachians. Writing of “Where the Water-Dogs Laughed,” the concluding volume of the “Hiwassee” Series, Hunter James, reviewer for the “Winston-Salem Journal,” says Price “brilliantly mines the legends and history of the Southern mountains” and that it “begs comparison with ‘Cold Mountain.’” James adds, “ There is more real ‘story’ in each of Price’s novels than in [Charles] Frazier’s first work” and that “it is worthy of a Faulkner.”
Price has twice received the Historical Fiction Award of the North Carolina Society of Historians, the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, and the Independent Publisher Book Award.
The Joyce T. Boone Endowed Lectureship for Southern Authors was established in memory of the late Joyce Thornton Boone by her husband, Doug Boone. This endowed lectureship supports special programs featuring visiting Southern writers.
Boone graduated from Atlantic Christian College with degrees in business administration (1978) and nursing (1988). An enthusiastic advocate for students and alumni of Barton College, Boone believed in the mission of the small, private, liberal arts college. She served on both the Barton College Board of Trustees and the Barton Alumni Council. Boone was president-elect of the Barton College Alumni Council when she passed away in October 2004.
For additional information, contact Dr. Jim Clark, chair of the Department of English, Modern Languages, and Religion, and Elizabeth H. Jordan Chair for Southern Literature, at 252-399-6450 or jclark@barton.edu.
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