PROLOGUE STARTS AT 7PM
MONDAY, JULY 12TH
WEBINAR, SIGN UP HERE
On Monday, July 12th, host Ben Steelman of the Star News will sit down (virtually) with author Lee Zacharias to discuss her new book, "What a Wonderful World This Could Be."
ABOUT THE BOOK
What Alex, illegitimate daughter of an alcoholic novelist and an artist, has always wanted is family. At 15, she falls in love with a 27-year-old photographer, whom she will leave when she comes under the spell of Ted Neal, a charismatic activist on his way to Mississippi for 1964’s Freedom Summer. That fall Ted organizes a collective that turns to the growing antiwar movement. Ultimately the radical group Weatherman destroys the “family” Alex and Ted have created, and in 1971 Ted disappears while under FBI investigation. When Ted surfaces eleven years later, Alex must put her life back together in order to discover what true family means.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lee Zacharias was born in Chicago. A graduate of Indiana University, Hollins College, and the University of Arkansas, she has taught at Princeton University and the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where for a decade she edited The Greensboro Review. She has held writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her first novel, Lessons, won North Carolina's Sir Walter Raleigh Award, her second novel, At Random, was a finalist in literary fiction for both the 2013 International Book Award and the 2013 National Indie Excellence Award, and her nonfiction, which has appeared in such journals as Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and The Gettysburg Review, has been reprinted in The Best American Essays. She is a photographer as well as the author of five books of fiction. The Only Sounds We Make, a collection of personal essays, won a silver medal in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards, and her third novel, Across the Great Lake, was named a 2019 Notable Michigan Book, received a silver medal in literary fiction in the 2019 Independent Publisher Book Awards, the 2019 North Carolina Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and the 2020 Phillip H. McMath Award. She co-edited the 2020 anthology Runaway with Luanne Smith and Michael Gills. Her fourth novel, What a Wonderful World This Could Be, was released from Madville Publishling on June 1, 2021.
