AN EVENING OF SPECULATIVE FICTION & FANTASY with BECCA GOMEZ FARRELL, MUR LAFFERTY & JAMES MAXEY
Tuesday, Sept. 19 at 7PM
North Carolina proved fertile ground for nurturing Rebecca Gomez Farrell's first book, the epic fantasy
Wings Unseen.
To celebrate its release, Gomez Farrell returns to the Triangle and will be joined by local authors Mur Lafferty and James Maxey to read from their works. From dragons to invisible flesh-eaters to murder mysteries in space, this trio offers a little bit of everything sci-fi and fantasy.
Rebecca Gomez Farrell is an associate member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her debut fantasy novel, Wings Unseen, is being published by Meerkat Press and she will have new short stories in the Dark Luminous Wings and Through A Scanner Farkly anthologies this fall. A former Carpe Durham contributor, Becca's food and drink blog,
the Gourmez.com, has garnered multiple accolades and influences every tasty bite of her fictional world building. Becca lives in Oakland, CA, with her tech wizard husband and two trickster cats.
James Maxey's mother warned him if he read too many comic books, they would warp his mind. Readers interested in sampling Maxey's odd ramblings might enjoy his science-fantasy Bitterwood series, the secondary world fantasy of his Dragon Apocalypse novels, his superhero novels Nobody Gets the Girl and Burn Baby Burn, or the steam-punk visions of Bad Wizard. In 2015, James was selected as the Piedmont Laureate. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina with his lovely and patient wife Cheryl and too many cats.
Mur Lafferty is a pioneer in podcasting and an exciting new voice in urban fantasy. Winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, her Ditch Diggers program is a Hugo finalist for the 2017 Best Fancast Award and The Shambling Guides 1 & 2, her urban fantasy novels from Orbit Books, have both won the Manly Wade Wellman Award. She started the I Should Be Writing podcast in 2005, making it one of the longest-running writing podcasts in existence. and co-founded Pseudopod, an Escape Pod spin-off presenting "the best in audio horror." In 2015, she was inducted into the
Podcaster Hall of Fame for her solo work, and the shows she's hosted and/or created for Tor.com, Lulu, and Angry Robot Books.
PRESCHOOL STORY TIME
Wednesday, September 20, 10:15AM
Join us for Preschool Storytime at The Regulator with Amy Godfrey. Free!
Amy Godfrey loves telling stories. With 10 years of experience as a Children's Librarian, Amy Godfrey is known for her energetic musical story times and is bringing that fun to The Regulator every Wednesday!
NONFICTION AUTHORS ASSOCIATION (NFAA)
Wednesday, September 20, 6:15PM -- 7:45PM
MICHAEL HARDT
Thursday, September 21, 7:00PM
Join us for a talk and book signing at The Regulator with Michael Hardt, author of
Assembly, co-written with Antonio Negri.
Assembly draws from ideas developed in Hardt and Negri's well-known Empire trilogy and lays out how contemporary social movements can better harness power to effect lasting change. They challenge the assumption that social movements should return to the leader-driven movements of the past and instead advocate for more democratic, multitude-driven decision making.
Michael Hardt teaches in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author, with Antonio Negri, of the Empire trilogy: Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009), as well as Declaration (2012) and Assembly (2017).
JOHN STADDON
Monday, September 25, 7:00PM
Staddon's memoir traces his unusual path to becoming an academic and scientist -- from WWII London, to colonial Africa, and finally, to America, where he followed a slightly erratic graduate-school trajectory that ended up in a Harvard basement. The main part of The Englishman is about science; how biology transformed Staddon's worldview; Darwin; the evolving cybernetic revolution; and the experimental methods of influential and opinionated behaviorist B. F. Skinner. Staddon endeavors to make the scientific portion of his memoir as simple and nontechnical as possible, although a couple of graphs have intruded.
John Staddon is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology, and Professor of Biology and Neurobiology, Emeritus, at Duke University. He is a Faculty Affiliate at the John Locke Foundation and Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York (UK). He has published more than 200 research papers and six books.
BRYANT SIMON
Tuesday, September 26, 7:00PM
The Regulator welcomes Bryant Simon, author of
The Hamlet Fire: A 
Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives, for a reading and book signing.
Simon uses a long-forgotten factory fire in small-town North Carolina to show how cut-rate food and labor have become the new American norm. For decades the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1980s, it had become a post-industrial backwater, a magnet for businesses looking for cheap labor with little or almost no official
oversight. One of these businesses was Imperial Foods. This factory that had never been inspected caught fire and 25 workers-mostly single mothers, many of whom were black-perished behind locked doors. 80 years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, industrial disasters were supposed to have been a thing of the past. After spending several years talking to the survivors of the fire, award-winning historian Bryant Simon has written a vivid, potent, and riveting social autopsy of this place and time that shows how cheap labor, cheap government, and cheap food came together in a way that was bound for tragedy.
Bryant Simon is a professor of history at Temple University. He is the author of Boardwalk of Dreams, Everything but the Coffee, and The Hamlet Fire (The New Press). His work and commentary have been featured in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and numerous other outlets. He lives in Philadelphia.
PRESCHOOL STORY TIME
Wednesday, September 27, 10:15AM
Join us for Preschool Storytime at The Regulator with Amy Godfrey. Free!
HOLLIS ROBBINS
Wednesday, September 27, 7:00 PM
The co-editor of the new
Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers will discuss this highly praised anthology, which offers an extraordinary range of voices of African American women in print before, during, and after the Civil War. Edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this collection comprises work from 49 writers arranged into sections of memoir, poetry, and essays on feminism, education, and the legacy of African American women writers. Many of these pieces engage with social movements like abolition, women's suffrage, temperance, and civil rights, but the thematic center is the intellect and personal ambition of African American women and includes well-known writers like Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as lesser-known writers like Ella Sheppard, who offers a firsthand account of life in the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. Taken together, these incredible works insist that the writing of African American women writers be read, remembered, and addressed.
An extraordinary historical record." -The New York Times Book Review
Hollis Robbins is Chair of the Humanities Department at Peabody Institute and Director of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She was recently named 2017-2018 Delta Delta Delta Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park
DAREN WANG
Thursday, September 28, 7:00PM
The Regulator welcomes Daren Wang, the Executive Director of the Decatur Book Festival, for a reading and book signing of his first novel,
The Hidden Light of Northern Fires. Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain) calls Wang's debut, "a distinctive clear-eyed perspective on a fresh corner of the Civil War."
Rooted in the history of the only secessionist town north of the Mason Dixon Line, The Hidden Light of Northern Fires tells a story of redemption amidst a war that tore families and the country apart. Mary Willis has always been an outcast, an abolitionist in a town of bounty hunters and anti-Union farmers. When escaped slave Joe Bell collapses in her father's barn, Mary is determined to help him cross to freedom in nearby Canada. But the wounded fugitive is haunted by his vengeful owner, who relentlessly hunts him up and down the country, and his sister, still trapped as a slave in the South. As the countryside is riled by the drumbeat of civil war, rebels and soldiers from both sides bring intrigue and violence of the brutal war to the town and the farm, and threaten to destroy all that Mary loves.
Daren Wang is the Executive Director of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival, the largest independent book festival in the country. Before launching the festival, he had a twenty-year career in public radio, both national and local, with a particular focus on books and authors. Wang has written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Paste magazine, and Five Points magazine, among others. The Hidden Light of Northern Fires is his first novel.
written by an incredible line-up of 36 contemporary American authors, including folks like Sandra Cisneros, Richard Russo, Julia Alvarez, Anthony Doerr and Ann Patchett. 