SHORT STORY PANEL with David Lawrence Morse and Joseph Bathanti, moderated by Joanna Pearson at Flyleaf Books

Join us for the long and the short of it as we welcome three talented short story authors to Flyleaf Books! The evening will feature conversation between authors David Lawrence Morse and Joseph Bathanti about their new books, The Book of Disbelieving and The Act of Contrition and Other Stories. The conversation will be moderated by author Joanna Pearson.

David Lawrence Morse studied in Russia after the collapse of communism, cleaned toilets in Yosemite, and taught English then lived on a rice farm in the foothills of Yamaguchi, Japan, before eventually earning an MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. He is now the director of the writing program at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, One Story, Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. His first play, Quartet, was performed by the Takács Quartet and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival

Joseph Bathanti is the former Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-14) and recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature. He is the author of nineteen books, including award-winning novels, volumes of poetry, a short story collection, and memoir. Bathanti is Professor of English & McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University. He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, North Carolina, and is the co-founder of the Medical Center’s Creative Writing Program. He also teaches in Carlow University’s low residency MFA Program in Creative Writing in Pittsburgh, where he was born and raised..

Joanna Pearson’s second short story collection, Now You Know It All, was chosen by Edward P. Jones for the 2021 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her first collection of short stories, Every Human Love, was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Foreword Indies Awards, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction. Originally from western North Carolina, she is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and now lives in Carrboro with her family.