January 4, 2007
SELINSGROVE, (Pa.) – Tom Bailey, associate professor of English and creative writing, will present a reading from his latest novel, Cotton Song, on Thursday, January 25. The reading will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Seibert Hall's Isaacs Auditorium at Susquehanna University. The event is free and open to the public. Copies of Cotton Song will be available for purchase and signing.
Cotton Song was released in October by Random House's Crown Publishing Group under the imprint of Shaye Areheart Books. The novel tells the story of one woman's fight to save an African-American child orphaned by the mob rule lynching of her mother.
Bailey draws on his intimate knowledge of the south to deliver this page-turning, historically-based tale set in World War II Mississippi. His grandmother was the first female director of the welfare department in Sunflower County, Mississippi. She lived next to the infamous Parchman Farm, a prison still in use today. As a child, Bailey watched the chain gangs working along roadsides, swinging their picks and shovels while singing spiritual hymns.
Juxtaposing his grandmother's opened-minded, unbiased spirit with the Jim Crow mindset, Cotton Song was born. In it, Letitia Johnson is the nanny for the infant daughter of one of the town's most distinguished white couples. When the child is found dead, drowned in her bath, the townspeople are enraged and point a guilty finger at Letitia. Within a day, she is charged, sentenced and hanged. Left alone and uncertain of her mother's fate, Letitia's 12-year-old daughter Sally goes into hiding, fearful that she, too, will meet her mother's fate.
Baby Allen, the social worker assigned to Sally's case, gradually coaxes Sally out of hiding, wins her trust and secures her protection. But once the child is safe, Baby is left with an even greater mission: getting to the truth, finding the infant's real killer, and ultimately transforming the ways and attitudes of a town long in need of change.
Bailey is also the author of The Grace That Keeps This World (Random House, 2005). Based on his Pushcart Prize-winning short story “Snow Dreams,” the novel won the 2006 fiction prize from the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters. The award puts Bailey in league with such authors as Walker Percy, Richard Ford and Rick Bass.
Prior to joining the faculty of Susquehanna University in 1999, Bailey taught in the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University. His work has earned him a Newhouse Award from the John Gardner Foundation and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for fiction. It has been anthologized in New Stories from the South and been noted in The Best American Short Stories . In addition to his novels and collection of short stories , Bailey has published two instructional books with Oxford University Press, On Writing Short Stories and The Short Story Writer's Companion.
|
Contact: Victoria Kidd
570-372-4119
#vk/5055#
|
|
|
