WHAT: Author Event for Tommy Hays in conversation with Jennifer McGaha
WHEN: Tuesday, April 21st at 6:30pm
WHERE: Mary C. Jenkins Community Center at 221 Mills Ave, Brevard, NC

Join us for an exciting evening with local author Tommy Hays in conversation with Jennifer McGaha as Hays presents The Marriage Bed. A freak accident comes on the heels of a startling revelation--laying bare the foundation of a marriage, and a husband is left to grapple with the aftermath. A poetry professor at a small college in Asheville, NC, Asa Flowers, comes home one stormy evening to find his wife, Betsy, inexplicably distraught. As the evening goes on, the couple ends up in a heated argument that sends Asa to sleep out in their garage apartment for the first time in twenty-five years of marriage. The next morning, he wakes to blue sky and an altered world.

Tommy Hays is an acclaimed Southern writer, whose fiction grows out of his emotional connections to places he’s lived and known—Greenville, South Carolina; Asheville, North Carolina; and Atlanta. In addition to The Marriage Bed, he is the author of The Pleasure Was Mine, In the Family Way, Sam’s Crossing, and What I Came to Tell You. He has been inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors as well as the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the governor of North Carolina. He’s the retired Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC Asheville.

Jennifer McGaha is the author of three works of creative nonfiction, including The Joy Document, a collection of fifty essays celebrating midlife, Flat Broke with Two Goats, a 2018 OverDrive Big Library Read, and Bushwhacking: How to Get Lost in the Woods and Write Your Way Out, a Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award finalist. Her work has also appeared in many magazines and literary journals, including Image, The Huffington Post, The New Pioneer, Lumina, PANK, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Brevity, Bitter Southerner, Crab Creek Review, River Teeth, and others. An experienced writing workshop facilitator and Appalachian native, Jennifer lives in a wooded North Carolina hollow with her husband, two cats, four unruly dogs, seven relatively tame dairy goats, and an ever-changing number of chickens.

Books will be available for purchase at the event, with a book signing following the author talk. This event is free and open to the public. No RSVP required.