Delicious Reads

Our annual author-in-the-round fundraiser event

This event is made possible by Bill and Valerie Barnet.

Join Hub City Writers Project for an afternoon of cake and conversation at Delicious Reads! Featuring 18 authors of recently published books and a delicious assortment of cakes, fruit, crudités, and other bites to accompany mimosas, coffee, and tea.

Tickets are $50 for non-members and $45 for members. Tables are available to purchase for $315. All proceeds benefit the Hub City Writers Project.

This event will be held on Sunday, March 17 at 2 PM.
 

TICKETS 

Delicious Reads takes the form of “author-reader speed dating” where you will sit with six other people and hear seven of the scheduled authors. Each author will talk about their book before moving to the next table to repeat the process! Though you will not meet all eighteen authors at your table, every person attending will have a chance to buy every author’s book and have it signed.

Delicious Reads will take place Sunday, March 17 at the AC Marriott in downtown Spartanburg (225 W Main Street). The author-in-the-round proceedings will begin at 2 PM, but we recommend arriving by 1:45 to grab a mimosa and cake before the excitement starts! 

Please note: If you purchase an individual ticket you will be seated with other attendees who purchased individual tickets. These seats are first-come first-served.

Participating Authors:

Elizabeth Cox has published five novels, a collection of short stories, and a book of poetry. She has won the North Carolina Fiction Award, the Lillian Smith Award for a novel, and in 2013 she was awarded the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction. Cox taught creative writing at Duke University for seventeen years, and has also taught at Bennington College, Boston College, and MIT. She resides in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr is an advocate, Kentucky Teacher of the Year, and the author of a bestselling collection of narrative poetry about his childhood growing up queer in Appalachia, Gay Poems for Red States (University Press of Kentucky), recently named a Book Riot Best Book of 2023 and an IndieBound and American Booksellers Association’s must-have book for poetry lovers. His work exists at the intersection of queer identity, Appalachian identity, and the politics of innocence.

Willie is a candidate for the MFA in poetry at the University of Kentucky. He publishes and presents on the subjects of education, marginalization, and identity, and his story has been featured on ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, and in The Washington Post, Le Monde, and Good Morning America. His advocacy has led him to engage President Biden and to testify before the United States Congressional Committee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. His creative work has been published in 100 Days in Appalachia, 2RulesofWriting, Another Chicago Magazine, Largehearted Boy Blog, Smoky Blue Literary Magazine, Miracle Monocle, and Good River Review.

Elizabeth Engelhardt is Kenan Eminent Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Rea Frey is the award-winning author of several bestselling suspense novels. She is a Silver Falchion Awards Finalist, was voted Chicago Reader’s Best Nonfiction Writer, is a Book Pipeline film adaptation winner, and has been featured in US Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, Glamour, Popsugar, Hello Sunshine, Marie Claire, Shape, Hello Giggles, CrimeReads, Writer’s Digest, WGN, Fox News, Today in Nashville, and Talk of the Town. To learn more, visit reafrey.com.

Anna Gazmarian holds an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her essays have been published in The Rumpus, Longreads, The Sun, and The Guardian. Anna works for The Sun Magazine and lives with her family in Durham, North Carolina

Scott Gould is the author of five books, including The Hammerhead Chronicles, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Fiction, and Things That Crash, Things That Fly, which won a 2022 Memoir Prize for Books. His other honors include a Next Generation Indie Book Award, an IPPY Award for Fiction, the Larry Brown Short Story Award and the S.C. Arts Commission Artist Fellowship in Prose. His work has appeared in a number of publications, including Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, Pangyrus, Crazyhorse, Pithead Chapel, Garden & Gun, and New Stories from the South, among others. He lives in Sans Souci, South Carolina and teaches at the S.C. Governor’s School for the Arts & Humanities.

Gregg Hecimovich is Hutchins Family Fellow at Harvard University and professor of English at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. He is the author of six books and edited volumes, including The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2023), selected by The Washington Post as “One of the 10 Best Books of 2023.” Hecimovich received his Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University and is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and elsewhere. 

The novelist Tope Folarin calls The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: “Riveting . . . . an inspired amalgam of genres — part thriller, part mystery and part biography” (Washington Post). And Henry Louis Gates Jr. praises the work as “the greatest discovery in the history of African American literature.”

Hecimovich lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his wife, Christy, and two children, Soren and Trey.

Lindsay Lynch is a writer from Washington, DC. A longtime indie bookseller, she currently lives in Nashville, TN, where she works as a book buyer for Parnassus Books. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, Electric Lit, The Atlantic, The Offing and Lit Hub, among other places. She has been a participant in the Tin House Summer Work­shop and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Wyoming. Do Tell is her debut novel.

Claire Jiménez is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York. She is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins Press, 2019) and What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central, 2023). She received her M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University and her PhD in English with specializations in Ethnic Studies and Digital Humanities from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In 2019, she co-founded the Puerto Rican Literature Project, a digital archive documenting the lives and work of hundreds of Puerto Rican writers from over the last century. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina.

Cecilia Márquez is Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. Her research focuses on the history of Latinx people in the US South. Dr. Márquez writes and teaches about the formation of Latinx identity, Latinx social movements, and the importance of region in shaping Latinx identity. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Jill McCorkle’s first two novels were released simultaneously when she was just out of college, and the New York Times called her “a born novelist.” Since then, she has published five other novels and four collections of short stories, and her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories several times, as well as The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Five of her books have been New York Times Notable books, and her novel, Life After Life, was a New York Times bestseller. She has received the New England Booksellers Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, The Atlantic, and other publications. She was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard, where she also chaired the department of creative writing. She is currently a faculty member of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and is affiliated with the MFA program at North Carolina State University.

Rhonda McKnight is the author of The Thing About Home and several award-winning bestsellers, including An Inconvenient Friend. She is the winner of the 2015 Emma Award for Inspirational Romance of the Year. She has been nominated thrice for the African American Literary Award. She writes inspirational book club fiction and Christian romance stories about complex characters in crisis. Her goal is to touch the heart of women with the themes of faith, forgiveness, and hope. Originally from a small coastal town in New Jersey, she writes from the comfort of her South Carolina home.

Ray McManus is the author of four books of poetry: Punch. (winner of the 2015 Independent Publishers Book Award for Best Book of Poetry in North America), Red Dirt Jesus (selected by Alicia Ostriker for the Marick Press Poetry Prize 2011), and Driving through the country before you are born (winner of the South Carolina Book Prize in 2006), and a chapbook called Left Behind. He is the co-editor for the anthology Found Anew with notable contributors with South Carolina ties. His poems have been published in numerous journals such as Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, and POETRY magazine. He lives in South Carolina where he teaches for USC Sumter and serves as the Writer in Residence for the Columbia Museum of Art.

Vanessa Miller is a bestselling author, with several books appearing on ESSENCE Magazine's Bestseller List. She has also been a Black Expressions Book Club alternate pick and #1 on BCNN/BCBC Bestseller List. Most of Vanessa's published novels depict characters who are lost and in need of redemption. The books have received countless favorable reviews: "Heartwarming, drama-packed and tender in just the right places" (Romantic Times book review) and "Recommended for readers of redemption stories" (Library Journal). Visit her online at vanessamiller.com; Twitter: @Vanessamiller01; Instagram: @authorvanessamiller; Facebook: @Vanessamiller01.

Ed Southern grew up in Winston-Salem, NC, and Greenville, SC, and was educated in their public schools. He is the author of Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South (2021, Blair), a finalist for the 2022 SIBA Southern Book Prize. His work has appeared in The Bitter Southerner, storySouth, the North Carolina Literary Review, the Asheville Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Since 2008 he has been the executive director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network.

Dr. Selima Sultana (PhD, 2000, Geography, University of Georgia) is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies of Geography at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro (UNCG). Her research foci are in the area of Urban and Transportation Geography interested in the commuting/travel patterns of individuals, households, and among different race/ethnic groups, focusing on how people negotiate the conflicting demands of household responsibilities and the changing urban settings of their lives. Dr. Sultana has authored an edited book and more than 40 scholarly articles and her work has appeared in leading geographical journal such as the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, The Professional Geographer, Journal of Transport Geography, Transport Policy, Tourism Geographies, Urban Geography, Urban Studies, Growth & Change, Southeastern Geographer, and in London School of Economics and Political Science’s (LSE) blog website. Her research has been supported by the Department of Transportation through the University Transportation Center of Alabama, Center for Sustainability at Auburn University, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Guilford County Child Development.  Prior to appointment at UNCG, Dr. Sultana was an Assistant Professor at Auburn University. Dr. Sultana is currently working on several projects including transportation related energy use and Greenhouse Gas Emission, housing issues among immigrants, and a book (co-authored with Dr. Joe Weber) on the National Parks.

Susan Beckham Zurenda taught English for 33 years on the college level and at the high school level to AP students. Her debut novel, Bells for Eli (Mercer University Press, March 2020; paperback edition March 2021), has been selected the Gold Medal (first place) winner for Best First Book—Fiction in the 2021 IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Awards), a Foreword Indie Book Award finalist, a Winter 2020 Okra Pick by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, a 2020 Notable Indie on Shelf Unbound, a 2020 finalist for American Book Fest Best Book Awards, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for 2021. She has won numerous regional awards for her short fiction. She lives in Spartanburg, SC.

About Hub City Writers Project

Hub City Writers Project is a literary nonprofit organization located in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Comprised of an acclaimed literary book publisher, an independent bookshop, and a literary programmer focused on education and outreach, our mission is cultivating readers and nurturing writers in both the Spartanburg community and throughout the South to foster an inclusive literary arts culture.

Tax-deductible donations help support the publication of extraordinary new and unsung writers from the American South, especially books that don’t fit into the commercial publishing landscape; book prizes that support early career writers; workshops, conferences, and classes aimed at fostering literary community in upstate South Carolina and beyond; access initiatives such as Growing Great Readers, Books at the Bus Stop, and Books as Mirrors, that have put over 30,000 books into schools and libraries county-wide.