Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home Museum

The Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home will present “An Evening with Charles Frazier” on Wednesday, Nov. 14 at 7 p.m. at Trinity United Methodist Church, located at 225 W. President St. on Telfair Square in Savannah, Ga. This event is free and open to the public.

The evening will feature an intimate conversation with this National Book Award-winning author, led by Dr. Beth Howells, Chair of the Literature Department and Professor of Literature at Georgia Southern University. A reception and book signing with Frazier will immediately follow.

 

“We’re thrilled to bring Charles Frazier to Savannah," said event organizer Beverly Willett, vice president of the board of directors for the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home. “We hope the Savannah community will enjoy this rare opportunity to spend an evening with one of America’s most accomplished, talented authors. It will be the literary event of the fall!”

 

Born in Asheville, N.C., Frazier grew up in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Cold Mountain, his highly acclaimed first novel, is an international bestseller that won the National Book Award in 1997 and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film by Anthony Minghella in 2003.

 

His second novel, Thirteen Moons, is a New York Times bestseller that was named a best book of the year by the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His third novel, Nightwoods, also a New York Times bestseller, is a critically acclaimed literary thriller set in a fictional Western North Carolina town in the early 1960s.

 

Frazier’s latest novel, Varina, released in April of 2018, is a fictional reimagining of the life of Varina Howell Davis, the First Lady of the Confederate States of America, before, during and after the Civil War. Varina is included on Garden & Gun’s list of the “Best Books of 2018” and has been described as “beautifully rendered” by The New York Times.

 

Frazier received a B.A. from the University of North Carolina, an M.A. from Appalachian State University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of South Carolina. He taught English at University of Colorado Boulder and at North Carolina State University. 

 

“An Evening in Conversation with Charles Frazier” is part of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home’s Ursrey Lecture Series. The series is endowed in memory of Terry and Ashley Ursrey, native Georgians and brothers who, like Flannery O'Connor, were lifelong devotees of all things Southern, particularly the art of storytelling.

 

The Ursrey Lecture Series officially debuted in 2008 with a talk by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham and has included illustrious contemporary authors like Roxane Gay, Ann
Hood, Robert Olen Butler, Luis Alberto Urrea, Jaimy Gordon and Allan Gurganus.

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