Sheri Joseph: Angels at the Gate in Conversation with Susan Zurenda

Join us on October 7th at 6 PM for an evening with Sheri Joseph, author of Angels at the Gate, in conversation with Susan Zurenda.

Get a 10% discount on the book when you RSVP on Eventbrite and present it at the bookshop register.

At remote Rockhaven University, the shocking death of student Brantley Simms beneath the bell tower shatters the campus, a place that once felt safeguarded by local angels. A year later, Leah Gavin, who knew Brantley under strained circumstances, becomes study partners with his former roommate from a rival fraternity and begins to unravel the mystery surrounding Brantley’s death. Her questions lead her back to Brantley’s fraternity and her own closest friends, and from there into secret societies and the darker side of her beloved college. As Leah develops feelings for one boy, she finds herself entangled in a complicated relationship with another, who harbors his own suspicions about the tragedy. Caught between two people she cares for — three if she includes the one who is gone — Leah must confront the unsettling truths she discovers while continuing to navigate her own precarious life as a student. Angels at the Gate offers a poignant exploration of college life to the beat of a 1980s mixtape, set in an unusually insular environment permeated by misogyny and sexual repression.

Sheri Joseph is a fiction writer based in Atlanta, where she teaches in the creative writing program at Georgia State University. Her previous books are Where You Can Find Me, Stray, and Bear Me Safely Over. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Grub Street National Book Prize in fiction, as well as numerous residency fellowships including MacDowell and Yaddo.

Susan Beckham Zurenda taught English for 33 years on the college level and at the high school level to AP students. Her debut novel, Bells for Eli (Mercer University Press, March 2020; paperback edition March 2021), was selected the first place winner for Best First Book—Fiction in the 2021 IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Awards), a Foreword Indie Book Award finalist, a Winter 2020 Okra Pick by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, a 2020 Notable Indie on Shelf Unbound, a 2020 finalist for American Book Fest Best Book Awards, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for 2021. Susan has won numerous awards for her short fiction, including winning the South Carolina Fiction Prize twice. Her second novel, The Girl From the Red Rose Motel (Mercer University Press, September 2023), was the recipient of the 2024 Patricia Winn Award in Southern Fiction, Gold Medal winner in the 2024 IPPY Awards for Southeast Fiction, a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee, a Shelf Unbound 2023 Notable 100 books, and a finalist in the American Book Fest Awards. The author lives in Spartanburg, SC.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Hub City Writers Project, 186 W Main St, Spartanburg, United States