Jill McCorkle
Chattanooga State hosted acclaimed southern author Jill McCorkle, for its third in the series Writers@Work Program. Ms. McCorkle spent a week in Chattanooga meeting with community writers, guests, and thousands of students on Chattanooga State’s campus to discuss her writing process as well as several of her literary works including Creatures of Habit and her latest novel Life After Life. Participants enjoyed lively readings by Ms. McCorkle in addition to Question and Answer sessions and book signings.
McCorkle is currently working on her next novel and resides with her husband in Hillsborough, N.C.
In 2015, Chattanooga State invites authors Rick Bragg and Lila Q. Weaver for its fourth in the series Writers@Work, April 13-17. Mr. Bragg is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer of best-selling and critically acclaimed books on the people of the foothills of the Appalachians, All Over but the Shoutin’, Ava’s Man, and The Prince of Frogtown. Mr. Bragg, a native of Calhoun County, Al., calls these books the proudest examples of his writing life, what historians and critics have described as heart-breaking anthems of people usually written about only in fiction or clichés. They chronicle the lives of his family cotton pickers, mill workers, whiskey makers, long sufferers, and fist fighters.
Graphic novel author Lila Quintero Weaver emigrated with her family from Argentina to Alabama in 1961 at the age of five. Her first graphic novel, Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White, looks back to her childhood as an immigrant in the Jim Crow South in the heart of Alabama’s Black Belt. As educated, middle-class Latino immigrants in a region that was defined by segregation, the Quinteros occupied a privileged vantage from which to view the racially charged culture they inhabited. Weaver and her family were firsthand witnesses of key moments in the civil rights movement.
For more information on Chattanooga State’s Writers@Work, contact Erica Lux at erica.lux@chattanoogastate.edu or visit Facebook at Chatt State’s Writers at Work or Twitter at @CSWritersatWork.