Past Portents: Stories in Prose & Poetry

“Past Portents: Stories in Prose and Poetry,” a joint reading and signing by authors Joni Tevis and A. Scott Henderson, will take place Wednesday, March 30, at 4 p.m. in the Pitts Room on the second floor of James B. Duke Library on the Furman University campus.

Free and open to the public, the reading is sponsored by the Friends of the Furman University Libraries. Copies of the authors’ books will be available for purchase, and Henderson and Tevis will be available afterward to sign copies.

Joni Tevis, author of The World is On Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of the Apocalypse, is the Bennette E. Geer Professor of Literature at Furman University. She is a creative writer with research interests in the essay, environmental writing, and atomic literature. Her essay, “What the Body Knows,” which is included in The World is On Fire, won the 2014 Pushcart Prize. “We live in a world of ghosts,” Tevis says. In her new book of essays, Tevis embarks on journeys to places that are haunted with remnants of the past, responding to them both emotionally and intellectually, trying to get at the heart of how she and others experience them. Her first book, The Wet Collection, was published in 2007.

Scott Henderson, author of Gin and Gardenias: A Memoir of Desire, Loss, and Love, is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Education at Furman University. He has written a verse memoir providing an overview of his life, while also exploring the process of forming a social and spiritual identity in the contemporary South. “Henderson’s verse memoir of growing up gay in the South, of finding and losing his beloved partner, and of embracing his own identity will touch your heart and mind in equal measure,” says poet Gilbert Allen.

For more information, contact Kathy Hamlin 864.294.2191 or kathleen.hamlin@furman.edu.