New books from Carolinas Writers

Carolinas writers are busy cranking out books.
Vanderbilt professor and Rutherfordton native Tony Earley has a new story collection,  "Mr. Tall,"

Alan Michael Parker

out in August. It's been 20 years since Earley's last collection, "Here We Are in Paradise." So what's he been doing? I'll save that news.

Former N.C. Poet Laureate Fred Chappell has a collection of poems, "Familiars," due in August from LSU Press. If you haven't guessed, it's about cats.
Davidson's Alan Michael Parker has a novel due in June from Dzanc Publishers. Says Parker: "The Committee on Town Happiness" is set in a fictional small town, not a college town. Kirkus Review: "Parker's not trying to be Dostoevsky here but rather wishes to create light and good-natured entertainment -- and he succeeds."
 UNC Charlotte's Aimee Parkinson's eerily intriguing novel, "The Petals of Your Eyes," is out in May from Starcherone Books. About her collection of stories, "The Innocent Party," Cris Mazza ("How to Leave a Country") wrote: "These stories are like running a finger around a seemingly smooth edge of glass -- you don't know you've been cut until you bleed."
Charlotte's Kim Wright, whose novel "Love in Mid Air," was praised by Publisher's Weekly for "its fresh perspective and sympathetic characters few writers can match," has a novel, "The Unexpected Waltz," due in May from Gallery Books.

Lee Smith

Scott Ely was a popular fiction writing professor at Winthrop University in Rock Hill. Ely died in October, and his last novel, "Plumb's Bluff," is due in June from Livingston Press. If you know Ely's work, it won't surprise you to find a hero gunning to win a national rapids race, as well as a murder to solve and a Romanian sculptress who swims nude in the river's baptismal pool. Unadulterated Ely.

Hendersonville native Robert Morgan ("The Road from Gap Creek") says he's finishing a novel set in 1850 -- "The Year of the Fugitive Slave Law" -- about two slaves who escape from the Carolinas and make their way to Ithaca, N.Y.
Down in Sullivans Island, S.C., Josephine Humphreys ("Nowhere Else on Earth") is working on a novel with a contemporary setting and is also absorbed in "something -- I'm not sure what -- about Colonial Haiti. I'll be back with more on that.
Hillsborough's Lee Smith ("Guests on Earth") has finished a memoir called "Dimestore." Smith's dad owned the Ben Franklin dimestore in the small, coal-mining town of Grundy, Va. The project, she says, "got a kick start recently when the entire town was demolished as part of the flood-control project." The house she was born in was also bulldozed. Someone salvaged the Smiths' brass door knocker, which now hangs in her study.