Snowden Wright & Leona Sevick In Conversation with George Singleton

Join us for a night full of authors and conversations! Snowden Wright and Leona Sevick will be in conversation with Hub City Press author George Singleton about their new books "Queen City Detective Agency" (Wright) and "The Bamboo Wife" (Sevick). Meet us at the Bookshop on August 29th at 6 p.m. This is a free event open for anyone to join.

Save your seat when you RSVP and get a 10% discount on the books when you purchase through Eventbrite.

Following an unforgettable cast of characters and a jaded female P.I. enmeshed in a criminal conspiracy in 1980s Mississippi, The Queen City Detective Agency is a riveting, razor-sharp Southern noir that unravels the greed, corruption, and racism at the heart of the American Dream.

Meridian, Mississippi—once known as the Queen City for its status in the state—has lost much of its royal bearing by 1985. Overshadowed by more prosperous cities such as New Orleans and Atlanta, Meridian attracts less-than-legitimate businesses, including those enforced by the near-mythical Dixie Mafia. The city’s powerbrokers, wealthy white Southerners clinging to their privilege, resent any attempt at change to the old order.

Real-estate developer Randall Hubbard took advantage of Meridian’s economic decline by opening strip malls that catered to low-income families in Black neighborhoods—until he wound up at the business end of a .38 Special. Then a Dixie Mafia affiliate named Lewis “Turnip” Coogan, who claims Hubbard’s wife hired him for the hit, dies under suspicious circumstances while in custody for the M**der.

Ex-cop turned private investigator Clementine Baldwin is hired by Coogan’s bereaved mother to find her son’s killer. A woman struggling with her own history growing up in Mississippi, Clem braves the Queen City’s corridors of crime as she digs into the case, opening wounds long forgotten. She soon finds herself in the crosshairs of powerful and dangerous people who manipulate the law for their own ends—and will K*ll anyone who threatens to reveal their secrets.

Leona Sevick's The Bamboo Wife captures the experiences of an imperfect woman held up against the standard of "good" wife and mother. Sevick is a master of metaphor and imagery, depicting, for example, a mother as a kraken. In the sea creature's words, "It takes a hard-ass woman to raise her young." Every poem is wrought with precise description and emotion. We get nature as well as some location-based poems orienting us in Korea. There is anger and sadness, "the animal need to run in all directions at once," and family trauma both past and present. This trauma is inflicted on the speaker as a child and to some degree perpetuated through her own parenting. The collection asks the reader to provide space in poetry for a woman trying to do her best for her own and others' sake, for one who has "made bad decisions and lived." Every poem is necessary, and Sevick makes each word count. Honesty carries this collection through her speaker's good, bad, and ugly moments. It takes courage for someone to say, "there's no mistake I haven't made."

Born and raised in Mississippi, Snowden Wright is the author of American Pop, a Wall Street
Journal WSJ+ Book of the Month and NPR Best Book of the Year. He has written for The
Atlantic, Salon, Esquire, The Millions, and the New York Daily News, among other publications,
and previously worked as a fiction reader at The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Paris Review.
Wright was a Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellow at the Carson McCullers Center, and his
small-press debut, Play Pretty Blues, received the Summer Literary Seminar’s Graywolf Prize.
He lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi.

Leona Sevick’s recent work appears in Orion, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, The Southern Review, and The Sun. Leona serves on the advisory board of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center and is provost and professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature. She is the 2017 Press 53 Poetry Award Winner for her first full-length book of poems, Lion Brothers. The Bamboo Wife is her second book of poems.

George Singleton has published ten collections of stories, two novels, a book of writing advice,
and a collection of essays. His stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Story,
One Story, Playboy, the Georgia Review, Zoetrope, Subtropics, and elsewhere. His personal
essays have appeared in Garden and Gun, Bark, Best American Food Writing, Oxford American, and elsewhere He’s received a Pushcart, and a Guggenheim fellowship. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, he lives in South Carolina.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Hub City Bookshop & Press, 186 West Main Street, Spartanburg, United States