Looming: The Carolina Mountains Literary Festival

Off tonight for Burnsville, the small hamlet that's home to the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, which always manages to surprise. I'll be reading both tomorrow and Saturday, and look forward to meeting (or seeing again) the other folks on the roster, and off it. The schedule is here. Should be a fine time.

Here's the statement about this year's festival from the festival website:

"Coming Home is the theme for the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival’s 2010 celebration of reading, readers, books, and writers. This year’s featured Saturday night banquet speaker and inspiration for our theme is Tony Earley, author of Jim the Boy and the sequel Blue Star. Jim grows up in a rural North Carolina town, experiences the depression, falls in love, goes off to WWII, and then comes home,albeit a changed man.

Friday’s keynote speaker is Paul Cuadros whose book, A Home on the Field, tells the story of a community brought together by a North Carolina championship high school soccer team. Home-grown and immigrant families find that Coming Home sometimes means looking around and appreciating people often taken for granted in their home town. Coming Home includes learning more about our local history and recognizing local writers too."