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Virtual Author Talks this Summer
July 6, 2023 - August 31, 2023
The Rowan-Cabarrus Community College Library has launched a series of virtual author talks this summer, a range of talks from bestselling authors and thought leaders.
Register for online author talks this summer! Each webinar will include the opportunity for you to ask questions. To check out more than the highlighted authors below, visit https://libraryc.org/rccclibrary/.
Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War
Thursday, May 5th at 1:00 PM EDT
This event has already taken place, but you can view the talk at https://libraryc.org/rccclibrary/29636
To download a copy of the book, visit https://dogwood.overdrive.com/dogwood-rowancabarrus/content/media/6219663
You’re invited to an insightful chat with award-winning author Grace M. Cho as she discusses her memoir, Tastes Like War:
Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details—language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life.
Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia. In her mother’s final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her mother’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her—but also the things that kept her alive.
Author Talk with Tananarive Due: Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda Contributing Author
Wednesday, June 28th at 8:00 PM EDT
Register for this author talk at https://libraryc.org/rccclibrary/29649
To download a copy of the book, visit https://dogwood.overdrive.com/dogwood-rowancabarrus/content/media/3911694
Please join us for a chat with Tananarive Due about her newest work, The Wishing Pool and Other Stories. The second collection of stories by the author is full of her signature offerings of horror, science fiction, and suspense while confronting monsters of all kinds, including racism, the monster within, and the supernatural. Due’s prolific body of work cements the author as a leading voice in black speculative fiction for more than 20 years. Due is an award-winning writer, educator, and producer. Her body of work includes sixteen books, including the Blood Colony, The Living Blood, The Good House, Joplin’s Ghost, Devil’s Wake, and the forthcoming The Reformatory. In addition, she is a contributing author of Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda and Black Panther: Sins of the King. Collaborating with her partner Steven Barnes, she also co-wrote “A Small Town” for Season 2 of Jordan Peele’s “The Twilight Zone” on Paramount Plus and two segments of Shudder’s anthology film Horror Noire.
About the Author: Tananarive Due is an American Book Award–winning, Essence bestselling author of sixteen books. She was also a contributor to Jonathan Maberry’s middle grade anthology, Don’t Turn Out the Lights. She has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award. She teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Visit her website TananariveDue.com.
Crying in the Bathroom: A Memoir: An Author Talk with Erika Sánchez
Tuesday, July 25th at 4:00 PM EDT
Register for this author talk at https://libraryc.org/rccclibrary/29652
To download a copy of the book, visit https://dogwood.overdrive.com/dogwood-rowancabarrus/content/media/6799362
Join us as we chat with award-winning writer Erika Sánchez about her utterly original, moving, and disarmingly funny memoir-in-essays Crying in the Bathroom.
Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the nineties, Erika Sánchez was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment—a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy, often laughing so hard with her friends that she had to leave her school classroom. Twenty-five years later, she’s now an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, but she’s still got an irrepressible laugh, an acerbic wit, and singular powers of perception about the world around her.
In these essays, Sánchez writes about everything from sex to white feminism to debilitating depression, revealing an interior life rich with ideas, self-awareness, and perception. Raunchy, insightful, unapologetic, and brutally honest, Crying in the Bathroom is Sánchez’s best—a book that will make you feel that post-confessional high that comes from talking for hours with your best friend.
About the Author: Erika L. Sánchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was published by Graywolf in July 2017 and was a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award. Her debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, published in October 2017 by Knopf Books for Young Readers, was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Awards finalist. It is now being made into a film directed by America Ferrera. Most recently, Sánchez published a critically acclaimed memoir-in-essays titled Crying in the Bathroom with Viking Books. Sánchez was a Fulbright Scholar, a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent fellow from the Poetry Foundation, a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow, a 2018 recipient of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, and a 2019 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz chair at DePaul University in Chicago.
Author Talk with Cassandra Clare: Bestselling Author of The Mortal Instruments Series
Wednesday, August 23rd at 8:00 PM EDT
Register for this author talk at https://libraryc.org/rccclibrary/29637
To download a copy of her books, visit
Join us for an exciting evening online as we chat with mega-bestselling author, Cassandra Clare, about her newest and final book in The Last Hours series, Chain of Thorns.
In Chain of Gold, the first book of The Last Hours Series, the readers meet Cordelia. Cordelia Carstairs is a Shadowhunter, a warrior trained since childhood to battle demons. When her father is accused of a terrible crime, she and her brother travel to London in hopes of preventing the family’s ruin. Soon Cordelia encounters childhood friends James and Lucie Herondale and is drawn into their world of glittering ballrooms, secret assignations, and supernatural salons, where vampires and warlocks mingle with mermaids and magicians. All the while, she must hide her secret love for James, who is sworn to marry someone else. But Cordelia’s new life is blown apart when a shocking series of demon attacks devastate London. Trapped in the city, Cordelia and her friends discover that their own connection to a dark legacy has gifted them with incredible powers—and will soon learn the true cruel price of being a hero.
Chain of Iron, the second book in the series, Cordelia seems to have everything she ever wanted. She’s engaged to marry James Herondale, the boy she has loved since childhood. She has a new life in London with her best friend Lucie Herondale and James’ charming companions, the Merry Thieves. She is about to be reunited with her beloved father. And she bears the sword Cortana, a legendary hero’s blade. Together with the Merry Thieves, Cordelia, James, and Lucie must follow the trail of the knife-wielding killer through the city’s most dangerous streets. All the while, each is keeping a shocking secret: Lucie, that she plans to raise Jesse from the dead; Cordelia, that she has sworn a dangerous oath of loyalty to a mysterious power; and James, that he is being drawn further each night into the dark web of his grandfather, the arch-demon Belial. And that he himself may be the killer they seek.
In the third and final installment in the series, Chain of Thorns, Cordelia has lost everything that matters to her. Even worse, she is now bound to an ancient demon, Lilith, stripping her of her power as a Shadowhunter. After fleeing to Paris, Cordelia hopes to forget her sorrows in the city’s glittering nightlife. But reality intrudes when shocking news comes from home: London is under new threat by the Prince of Hell, Belial. Cordelia returns to a London riven by chaos and dissent. The long-kept secret that Belial is James and Lucie’s grandfather has been revealed by an unexpected enemy, and the Herondales find themselves under suspicion of dealings with demons. Left alone in a shadowy London, they must face Belial’s deadly army. If Cordelia and her friends are going to save their city—and their families—they will have to muster their courage, swallow their pride, and trust one another again. For if they fail, they may lose everything—even their souls.
About the Author: Cassandra Clare was born to American parents in Teheran, Iran and spent much of her childhood traveling the world with her family, including one trek through the Himalayas as a toddler where she spent a month living in her father’s backpack. She lived in France, England and Switzerland before she was ten years old.
After college, Cassie lived in Los Angeles and New York where she worked at various entertainment magazines and even some rather suspect tabloids where she reported on Brad and Angelina’s world travels and Britney Spears’ wardrobe malfunctions. She started working on her YA novel, City of Bones, in 2004, inspired by the urban landscape of Manhattan, her favorite city. She turned to writing fantasy fiction full time in 2006. Her first book, The City of Bones, became and led to numerous instant #1 New York Times and USA Today Bestsellers including but not limited to The rest of The Mortal Instruments series, The Infernal Devices series, and The Last Hours series.