Buxton Books is incredibly proud to host poet Richard Tillinghast and author Josephine Humphreys for a very special reading and conversation on poetry and the novel. Books from the catalogs of both the poet and author will be available for purchase to have signed in the shop that day! This is a free, in-store event, so please email rsvp@buxtonbooks.com to reserve your spot.
Please note: This event is now SOLD OUT. Please email becky@buxtonbooks.com to join the waitlist!
About Josephine Humphreys:
A native of Charleston, S.C., Josephine Humphreys is a writer known for her moving and eloquent stories about life in the American South. She is the author of four novels: Dreams of Sleep (1984), winner of the Pen/Hemingway award for best first novel; Rich In Love (1987), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year which was also made into a movie; The Fireman's Fire (1991) also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Nowhere Else on Earth (2000), winner of the Southern Book award.
She studied creative writing with Reynolds Price at Duke University, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1967. She earned a master's degree in English studies from Yale University in 1968, and she studied at the University of Texas. Humphreys has won a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction (1986), the Lyndhurst Prize, and a Literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a member of the South Carolina Academy of Authors and the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
About Richard Tillinghast:
Poet Richard Tillinghast was born in Memphis, Tennessee. As an undergraduate at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, he participated in nonviolent protests against segregation and was active in the successful integration of the college. He went on to pursue graduate work at Harvard University, where he studied with Robert Lowell and earned his MA and PhD degrees. At the University of California-Berkeley, where he taught after leaving Harvard, he was active in the peace movement during the Vietnam War. For three years he taught in the college program at San Quentin State Prison.
He has also been active as an essayist, critic, and travel writer. He is the author of the critical memoir Robert Lowell’s Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur (1996), the essay collection Poetry and What Is Real (2004), and literary travel books including Finding Ireland: A Poet’s Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture (2008), and An Armchair Traveller’s History of Istanbul (2012), which was nominated for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. He was awarded the Cleanth Brooks Award for his nonfiction by The Southern Review. In 2000 Tillinghast founded the Bear River Writers’ Conference, which he directed until 2005, when he moved to Ireland. In 2011 he moved back to the United State, and divides his year between Hawaii and Sewanee, Tennessee.