It’s a special holiday edition of CoastLine with two original stories of the season.
Zelda Lockhartis a Visiting Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She is the 2010 winner of the Piedmont Laureate for Literature. And she is the author of three novels, including Fifth Born and Fifth Born 2: The Hundredth Turtle.
Fifth Born tells the story of Odessa Blackburn in St. Louis Missouri and rural Mississippi. She loses her grandmother when she is three. She suffers through sexual abuse perpetrated by her father, whom she saw kill his own brother. The next book, Fifth Born 2: The Hundredth Turtle, holds the story she reads on this edition.
Melody Moezzi is a Visiting Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She is an attorney, and she’s the author of The Rumi Prescription – which we discussed on this show in April 2020 – in the dawn of the pandemic.
The Rumi Prescription chronicles Moezzi's journey through mental health challenges with the guidance of the ancient Sufi mystic and poet, Rumi. She is Muslim, Iranian American. She is not Christian. But she loves Christmas and reads an excerpt about this from her book.
