Mark Powell in Conversation with Deno Trakas

Hub City welcomes author Mark Powell to the Bookshop for a conversation about his new novel Lioness. The novel recounts the fallout of an act of eco-terrorism at a water-bottling plant in the mountains of southwest Virginia, offering a heart-wrenching examination of extremism. Powell will be in conversation with Hub City author Deno Trakas. Come out to the shop at 6pm on Thursday, April 7th to discuss the book that Tom Perrotta says is "packed with a distinctly American, highly explosive mixture of religion, art, sexual obsession, mental illness, and environmental menace."

This event is free and open to all, but save your seat and your copy of the book through the link below!

Save Your Seat!

About the Book

In the fall of 2018, a bomb goes off at a water-bottling plant in the mountains of southwest Virginia, an incident the FBI declares an act of ecoterrorism. Arrested at the scene is Chris Bright, a mountain hermit with a long history of activism. Unaccounted for—and presumed dead—is Mara Wood, an installation artist who in the last two years has lost her son and left her husband.

But Mara’s estranged husband David cannot quite believe she is dead, and as he goes about reconstructing the story of what happened, he begins to imagine an alternate narrative—one in which their son doesn’t die and his wife doesn’t leave him, one in which his wife doesn’t carry on a secret relationship with Chris Bright, a man bent on fighting back against the environmental despoliation of his Appalachian home. Lioness is a page-turning, heart-wrenching examination of extremism: What pushes people to act violently, and is that violence ever justified?

About the Author

Mark Powell is the author of seven previous novels including Small Treasons (2017, Gallery/Simon and Schuster), and Lioness from West Virginia UP. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Breadloaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences, and twice from the Fulbright Foundation to Slovakia and Romania. He directs the creative writing program at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. 

About the Conversation Partner

Deno Trakas is the former chair of the English Department and coordinator of the creative writing program at Wofford College. He's been a Hub City writer from the beginning and is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, a memoir, Because Memory Isn't Eternal, and a novel, Messenger from Mystery. His novel in progress is The Admiral of Smyrna.