Delicious Reads

May 4, 2025 at 2:00 P.M. at the AC Hotel in downtown Spartanburg. 

Join us for our annual Author-in-the-Round fundraiser, Delicious Reads! Hear from 17 authors and help us kick off our 30th anniversary year with cakes and sweets from local bakeries, mimosas, and, of course, plenty of books for sale.

How It Works: Grab an individual general admission ticket or make it an extra special afternoon with a table for 7. Great for book clubs! Each table enjoys 7 minutes with each author before they rotate to the next group. By the end of the event, you’ll have met seven incredible authors!

Tickets are $60 for non-members and $55 for members. A limited number of tables are available for $350. Reserve by March 20 to lock in your table pricing—availability is limited.

There will also be delicious cakes and sweets from local bakeries, mimosas, and, of course, plenty of books for sale. This event usually sells out, so please reserve your spot early.

Authors are still being added, so check back regularly!
 

TICKETS 

Participating Authors:

Hannah Palmer is a writer and artist from the Southside of Atlanta. Through essays, memoir, and public art projects, she explores how hidden histories and wildness shape our lives in the urban landscape. Her memoir Flight Path: A Search for Roots beneath the World's Busiest Airport was included on Atlanta Magazine’s list of “essential books that explain today’s Atlanta.” Palmer’s new book, The Pool Is Closed: Segregation, Summertime, and the Search for a Place to Swim was published by LSU Press in October 2024.

Kimberly Brock is the award winning author of The Fabled Earth, featured as a Must Read in Fall of 2024 by Town & Country Magazine, and The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare, which spent three weeks on the Southern Independent Booksellers Best Seller List. Both novel have been shortlisted for the prestigious Townsend Prize for Fiction. Her debut novel, The River Witch, was the recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year Award. Kimberly has been featured on the History Channel’s ‘History’s Greatest Mysteries,’ and is the founder of Tinderbox Writers Workshop, a transformative experience for women in the arts. A former actor and special needs educator, she speaks widely on the creative life and southern and historical fiction, serving as a guest lecturer for many regional and national writing workshops including at the Pat Conroy Literary Center. A native of North Georgia, she now lives near Atlanta where she is at work on her fourth novel.

Neesha Powell-Ingbire is a coastal Georgia-born-and-raised movement journalist, essayist, and community & cultural organizer living in Atlanta/traditional Muscogee territory. She’s the director of popular education at Press On, a Southern movement media collective. Neesha reports on the justice movements of the Black, trans, queer, and Southern communities to which she belongs and writes essays to recover her own history and the histories of her ancestors and their ancestral homes. Her writings have been published in various online and print publications, including Harper’s Bazaar, Oxford American, Scalawag, and VICE. Learn more about Neesha's work at neeshawrites.com.

Jody Hobbs Hesler has written ever since she could hold a pencil and now lives and writes in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Growing up, she split time between suburban Richmond, Virginia, and the mountains outside Winchester, Virginia. Experiences of all these regions flavor her writing. She is the author of the novel Without You Here (Flexible Press) and the story collection What Makes You Think You're Supposed to Feel Better (Cornerstone Press). She teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, and serves as assistant fiction editor for The Los Angeles Review.

C.J. Hooks is the author of the novels Can't Shake the Dust and Alligator Zoo-Park Magic. His work has appeared in print and online publications including: The Los Angeles Review, American Short Fiction, Four Way Review, The Tampa Review, The Bitter Southerner, and Burrow Press. He has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar and Contributor at Sewanee Writers' Conference, and attended DISQUIET: Dzanc Books International Literary Program. He teaches at Flagler College, and lives in St. Augustine.

F.K. Clementi is a writer, public intellectual, and a professor of English and Jewish Studies at the University of South Carolina (where she works and sometimes publishes under the name Schoeman). She is the author of Holocaust Mothers and Daughters: Family, History, and Trauma and South of My Dreams.

Marybeth Mayhew Whalen is the author of Every Moment Since and nine previous novels. Marybeth received a BA in English with a concentration in Writing and Editing from NC State University a long time ago and has been writing ever since. She is the co-founder of The Book Tide, an online community of readers where “a rising tide raises all books.” Marybeth and her husband Curt are the parents of six kids who are now all in various stages of adulting. A native of Charlotte, NC, Marybeth now calls Sunset Beach, NC home. 

T.I. Lowe is an ordinary country girl who loves to tell extraordinary stories. She is the #1 international bestselling author of twenty published novels, including her recent bestselling and critically acclaimed novel, Under the Magnolias, and her debut breakout, Lulu's Café. Fans of Delia Owens and Nicholas Sparks will enjoy Lowe's novels brimming with Southern charm and coastal vibes. Perfect for beach reads and book clubs!

Steven Petrow is an award-winning journalist and author who is best known for his Washington Post and New York Times essays on aging, health, and civility. He’s a contributor to NPR and other news outlets and his TED Talk, “Three Ways To Practice Civility,” has garnered nearly two million views. Petrow is the author of six previous books, including the bestselling Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Old and his newest title, The Joy You Make: Find the Silver Linings—Even on Your Darkest Days. He’s North Carolina’s 2024 Piedmont Laureate, and lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

Dustin M. Hoffman writes stories about working people. His newest story collection, Such a Good Man, is coming out soon with University of Wisconsin Press. He’s also the author of the story collection No Good for Digging and the fiction chapbook Secrets of the Wild (Word West Press). His first book One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (University of Nebraska Press) won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. He’s published more than one hundred stories in journals including Black Warrior Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Masters Review, Witness, Wigleaf, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, One Story. Before getting his MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University and his PhD in creative writing from Western Michigan University, he spent ten years painting houses in Michigan. Now he lives in South Carolina and teaches creative writing at Winthrop University.

Leigh Ann Henion is the New York Times bestselling author of Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark and Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer’s Search for Wonder in the Natural World. Her writing has appeared in Smithsonian, The Washington Post, Garden & Gun, Men's Journal, Backpacker, and a variety of other publications. She is a former Alicia Patterson Fellow, and her work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Henion lives in Boone, North Carolina.

Stephanie Clare Smith is a writer of deeply personal and imaginative work with wisdom and beauty that springs from those who understand what it feels like to be overlooked and left behind. An award-winning poet and essayist, Stephanie's newest book, Everywhere the Undrowned, traces the events of one harrowing summer and its repercussions throughout Stephanie's life, including her work with families in crisis and as a caregiver for the mother who abandoned her all those years ago. Stephanie is a social worker and mediator who works with at-risk families in the judicial system. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. Stephanie grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Barbara Presnell is the author of five collections of poetry, including Piece Work, which won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize and was adapted for stage by the Touring Theatre of North Carolina. Her forthcoming memoir, Otherwise, I'm Fine, tells the story of her grief and, across her tour of western Europe, the breakthroughs that released her from recurring depression, resolved her conflicted grief for her mother, and returned her beloved father to her and her siblings as a living memory. She has been awarded fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and has held residencies at Willapa Bay, Wildacres Retreat, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Soapstone, Inc. A native of Asheboro, North Carolina, she teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and lives in Lexington, North Carolina, with her husband, Bill Keesler. 

Timothy Silver is professor emeritus of history at Appalachian State University, author of Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains, and coauthor of An Environmental History of the Civil War. His latest book, Death in the Briar Bottom: The True Story of Hippies, Mountain Lawmen, and the Search for Justice in the Early 1970s, is a mix of true crime, southern history, and personal storytelling and shows how, in the dark of night at a remote mountain campsite, the killing of an innocent man epitomized the suspicion of young people and violence toward the counterculture that gripped the nation in the early 1970s.

Robert Gwaltney, a recipient of the 2022 Pat Conroy Writers Residency, was named 2023 Georgia Author of the Year for his debut novel, The Cicada Tree. He resides in Atlanta, Georgia where he is an active member of the Atlanta literary community serving as a board member for Broadleaf Writers Association. Robert’s work has appeared in such publications as Southbound Magazine, Southern Literary Review, The Blue Mountain Review, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. His forthcoming novel, Sing Down The Moon, will be published by Mercer University Press in the Spring of 2026.

Laura Leigh Morris is the author of The Stone Catchers: A Novel, a finalist for the 2025 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, and Jaws of Life: Stories. She's previously published short fiction and essays in STORY Magazine, North American Review, The Florida Review, and other journals. She teaches creative writing and literature at Furman University in Greenville. To learn more, visit www.lauraleighmorris.com. 

Glenis Redmond is the First Poet Laureate of Greenville, South Carolina. She is a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist, and a Cave Canem alumni. She has authored six books of poetry: Backbone, Under the Sun, and What My Hand Say, Listening Skin, Three Harriets & Others, Praise Songs for Dave the Potter: Art by Jonathan Green, and Poetry by Glenis Redmond, and her latest collection, The Song of Everything: A Poet's Exploration of South Carolina's State Parks.  Her poetry has been showcased on NPR and PBS and has been most recently published in Orion Magazine, storySouth and The New York Times, as well as numerous literary journals nationally and internationally.  Glenis believes poetry is the mouth that speaks when all other mouths are silent. 

 

About Hub City Writers Project

Hub City Writers Project is a literary nonprofit organization 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 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.