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CAPE FEAR MEMORIAL BRIDGE CLOSURE: UPDATES, RESOURCES, AND CONTEXT
Prologue is WHQR's monthly book discussion, hosted by Ben Steelman of the Star News. Takes place on the second Monday of the month, at 7pm. Prologue is currently hosted via Zoom Webinar.

Prologue: "The Last Battleground: The Civil War Comes to North Carolina" with Philip Gerard

PROLOGUE STARTS AT NOON

Monday, June 10th

The MC Erny Gallery

See it on Facebook Live.

 

On Monday, June 10th, at NOON in the MC Erny Gallery, Ben Steelman of Wilmington's StarNews will sit down with author Philip Gerard to discuss his latest book, "The Last Battleground: The Civil War Comes to North Carolina."

ABOUT THE BOOK:
To understand the long march of events in North Carolina from secession to surrender is to understand the entire Civil War--a personal war waged by Confederates and Unionists, free blacks and the enslaved, farm women and plantation belles, Cherokees and mountaineers, conscripts and volunteers, gentleman officers and poor privates. In the state's complex loyalties, its sprawling and diverse geography, and its dual role as a home front and a battlefield, North Carolina embodies the essence of the whole epic struggle in all its terrible glory.

Philip Gerard presents this dramatic convergence of events through the stories of the individuals who endured them--reporting the war as if it were happening in the present rather than with settled hindsight--to capture the dreadful suspense of lives caught up in a conflict whose ending had not yet been written. As Gerard reveals, whatever the grand political causes for war, whatever great battles decided its outcome, and however abstract it might seem to readers a century and a half later, the war was always personal.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Philip Gerard was born in 1955 and grew up in Newark, Delaware. At the University of Delaware, he earned a B.A. in English and Anthropology. After college he lived in Burlington, Vermont, tending bar and writing freelance articles, before returning to newspaper work in Delaware and then going west to study fiction writing at the Arizona writers workshop. He taught at Arizona State University until 1986, then taught for a brief time at Lake Forest College in Illinois before migrating to coastal North Carolina.

He teaches in the BFA and MFA Programs of the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is co-editor with his wife, Jill Gerard, of Chautauqua, the literary journal of the Chautauqua Institution, and serves on the faculty of Goucher College's summer residency MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. He has written pver a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction. Gerard, an avid musician, incorporates bluegrass, folk, country, and original compositions into his readings, playing six and twelve-string guitar, dobro, banjo, and pedal steel guitar.

Mary Bradley moved to Wilmington from Los Angeles, CA in May 2007 with her husband Frank and twin baby daughters, Maggie and Kate. In California, Mary had been Drive Director and the producer of Elvis Mitchell's nationally syndicated public radio interview program "The Treatment" for public radio station KCRW for ten years. Mary was raised in Rhode Island and graduated from Boston University. Mary recently served as President of the Board of Directors of the Association of Fundraising Professionals Cape Fear Chapter.