A farm boy from the mountains of North Carolina, Rufus Edmisten could not have been prepared for the halls of power in Washington, D.C., during the Vietnam War era, as young men burned their draft cards and pro-cannabis factions held "smoke-ins" in the capital. A University of North Carolina Chapel Hill graduate, he earned a law degree at George Washington University and landed a job as counsel to U.S. senator Samuel J. Ervin, Jr. This led to Edmisten's appointment as Deputy Chief Counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee--he personally served Richard Nixon the first ever subpoena of a sitting president by Congress. Returning to North Carolina, he served as Attorney General and Secretary of State before retiring from public life to practice law and participate in charitable activities. Written with humor and candor, his memoir recalls the cultural contrasts of American life in the 1970s and 1980s, and affirms that the business of government is to enable us to live together peacefully.
Former North Carolina Attorney General and Secretary of State, Rufus L. Edmisten drew international attention when he served as deputy chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee. His work, together with that of others, uncovered the truth about the Watergate scandal in 1973. He has the distinction of being the first person on a congressional committee to serve a subpoena to a sitting president of the United States. A practicing lawyer and lobbyist, he lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
A moving and humorous memoir and an exploration of what it means to partner with dogs who use their brains and noses to help solve crimes and find the missing. Cat Warren has adapted her New York Times bestseller, What the Dog Knows, for younger readers. This version still contains the science and history of scent detection dogs, but its heart focuses on Solo, the impossible German shepherd puppy who grew up to search for the missing and dead. What the Dog Knows shows how love and loyalty can bring out the best in a dog — and his human.
Cat Warren is a professor at NCSU, where she teaches science journalism and creative nonfiction. She is also a cadaver dog handler. She lives with her husband, David, and their German shepherds in Durham, North Carolina.
SusanAlff: Susan lives in Cary and works at Quail Ridge Books! She has studied with poet Betty Adcock over several years and is part of a poetry writing group. She has published in Wraparound South.
Joan Barasovska: Joan grew up in Philadelphia and has lived in North Carolina since 2003. She is an academic therapist in private practice, treating children with learning disabilities and emotional and behavioral challenges. Joan cohosts the Flyleaf Books Poetry Series in Chapel Hill and serves on the Board of the North Carolina Poetry Society. Birthing Age is her first book of poetry.
Mary Hennessy: Mary was a nurse most of her adult life. She returned to school late and fell in with a community of generous, word-crazed people. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. One was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and included in the play Deployed. One rode the R-bus line in Raleigh. Poetry is the only thing that makes sense to her anymore.
Katherine Wolfe: Katherine lives in Goldsboro, North Carolina. She is a retired media coordinator with Wayne County Public Schools and a member of the Goldsboro Writers Group. Her chapbook Time That Has Gone was published in 2018.
Steve Lindahl is Managing Editor of Flying South and moderator for this event.
Flying South has been published annually since 2014. It is sponsored by Winston-Salem Writers. The group also provides demonstrations, workshops, critique groups, as well as the Poetry in Plain Sight and Ten Minute Play competitions.
Wired senior writer Andy Greenberg and author of This Machine Kills Secrets follows a small group of cybersecurity detectives as they’re pulled into the mysterious orbit of the Kremlin’s most dangerous hackers — beginning with investigations into local disruptions and blackouts throughout Eastern Europe and followed by full blown cyberwarfare targeting the world’s largest shipping firm, the drug maker Merck, and hundreds of American hospitals. Along the way, Andy Greenberg visits Russia to track down Sandworm himself and meets with the political leaders and security experts involved with NotPetya to determine how the next, even more destructive cyberwar debacle might be prevented.
“Sandworm is a sobering examination of an underreported story: the menace Russian hackers pose to the critical infrastructure of the West. With the nuance of a reporter and the pace of a thriller writer, Andy Greenberg gives us a glimpse of the cyberwars of the future while at the same time placing his story in the long arc of Russian and Ukrainian history.”
—Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gulag and Red Famine
Greenberg will be in conversation with Bronwen Dickey, contributing editor at The Oxford American and author of Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon.
Join us at Flyleaf for the sixth entry in the Voice Rising reading series. Hosted by local writer and musician Michael Venutolo-Mantovani, Voice Rising features a slate of local and unpublished writers presenting their work alongside a select writer of national acclaim. Each writer will read for ten minutes and then take questions from the audience. Come out to experience the creation of new works in real time, in an intimate and friendly setting, with folks from your community.
Adam O'Fallon Price is a writer and professor living in Chapel Hill. His work has been published in The Paris Review, Vice, The Iowa Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. He has published two novels, 2016’s The Grand Tour and his most recent, The Hotel Neversink, published this August.
Denise Heinze lives in Durham, North Carolina. A former literature professor and now full-time writer, Denise has published a slew of things from a scholarly work on Toni Morrison to a short story about a female ballplayer, Jackie Mitchell, who once struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. More recently, she’s published a satirical eco-thriller, Sally St. Johns (BookLocker, 2017). Her debut historical fiction, The Brief and True Report of Temperance Flowerdew, is forthcoming from Blackstone Publishing in Oct. 2020.
Jon Leon is the author of The Malady of the Century (Futurepoem, 2012) and a number of privately issued titles and special editions. His books have been featured in The Poetry Review (U.K.), The Quietus (U.K.), Oyster (Australia), Vice, Bomb, and Bidoun among other publications. Soft Pack is his first novel.
AndrésManosalva Castañeda is a writer and lawyer from Bogotá, Colombia, and now a Fiction MFA candidate at North Carolina State University. Having lived in Colombia, Texas, Brazil, DC and Raleigh, he writes about borders, money, the law and heists. He is currently working on his first novel, an intriguing robbery in a speculative economy in South America.
Berry Grass has lived in rural Missouri, Tuscaloosa, and now Philadelphia. They are the author of Hall of Waters (The Operating System, 2019). Their essays and poems appear in DIAGRAM, The Normal School, Barrelhouse, Waxwing, and Sonora Review, among other publications. They are a 2019 nominee for the Krause Essay Prize. They host Tragic: the Gathering — an occasional transgender literature reading series in Philadelphia. When they aren’t presently reading submissions as Nonfiction Editor of Sundog Lit, they’re embodying what happens when a Virgo watches too much professional wrestling.
Julia Watson is a native of Atlanta, Georgia and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Florida State University where she won the Sassaman Award for Outstanding Creative Writing. Currently, she is pursuing her MFA in Poetry at North Carolina State University. She is the Writer Liaison for Ember: a Journal of Luminous Things and taught 5th grade English in North Carolina this past year. Her works have been published in (Un)incorporated, The Kudzu Review, Outrageous Fortune, RueScribe, Hysterical Rag, among other magazines. When not engaged in literature, she enjoys cooking vegan meals with lots of Sriracha.
Angela Wilhite is completing her second year of the MFA Creative Writing program at NC State University. She has attended the Till Writing Residency in Arlington, Washington and the Community of Writers Conference in Squaw Valley, California. Her short story, “La Posada”, was a finalist in the 2018 NC State Fiction Contest. She is currently working on a satirical novel set in her mother’s home city of Monterrey, Mexico and a collection of personal essays inspired by Mexican-American performers and artists such as Selena Quintanilla, La Chica Boom, and the Asco art collective.
