Wilson, N.C. — Barton College will welcome novelist and poet Joanna Catherine Scott for the upcoming Victor R. Small Writers Series this spring semester. The program is scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 22, at 7:30 p.m., and will be held in The Sam and Marjorie Ragan Writing Center on campus. This event is open to the public at no charge, and the community is invited to attend.
Scott is the author of five novels, three books of poetry, and a book of nonfiction, “Indochina’s Refugees: Oral Histories from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam” (1989), written in the Philippines. Her latest novel, “Child of the South,” finalist for the 2009 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, tells the story of mixed-race Abraham Galloway, born a slave in eastern North Carolina and elected as a state senator during Reconstruction. “Child of the South” is a sequel to her North Carolina Civil War era novel, “The Road from Chapel Hill” (2006).
Earlier novels suggest the range of Scott’s interests: “Charlie: A Novel of War” (2007) follows an American soldier who fathers a child in Vietnam, “Cassandra, Lost” (2004) tells the story of an eighteenth-century Maryland heiress who elopes to Revolutionary France, and “The Lucky Gourd Shop” (2000) is inspired by the life of her Korean children’s birth mother.
Scott’s books of poetry are “Night Huntress” (2008), “Fainting at the Uffizi” (2005), and “Breakfast at the Shangri La” (2004), winner of Black Zinnias Poetry Book Award.
Her manuscript-in-progress, “An Innocent in the House of the Dead,” grows from her friendship with a North Carolina Death Row innocent. Born in London and raised in Australia, Scott lives in Chapel Hill.
This program is sponsored by the Department of English and Modern Language. For additional information, please contact Dr. Rebecca Godwin, director of The Sam and Marjorie Ragan Writing Center, at 252-399-6364 or email: rlgodwin@barton.edu.
END
Questions? Please contact Kathy Daughety, director of public relations, at 252-399-6529 or email: kdaughety@barton.edu.