May 2025 Virtual Open Mic Night
2025-05-08 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York) | Online – Facebook Live
The Pat Conroy Literary Center’s monthly Open Mic Night will be presented as a virtual event, live-streamed to our Facebook page, on Thursday, May 8, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. Our featured presenter is fiction writer James Alan Gill, author of the story collection Not Dark Yet. Open Mic will also feature short readings of 3 to 5 minutes each by other writers in many genres.
When: Thursday, May 8, 2025 at 6 PM – 7:30 PM EDT
Price: Free · Duration: 1 hr 30 min
Where: Virtual – Facebook
Interested in reading as part of Open Mic? Let us know at contact@patconroyliterarycenter.org
We want to build our community of writers and an appreciation for the art and talent of new, emerging, and long-time writers. Thank you for supporting this partnership!
Event Facebook Page
About our author:
James Alan Gill was raised in a town with no stoplights by a family of coal miners, then attended Southern Illinois University at Carbondale where he earned degrees in History and Creative Writing.
His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Common, Sou’wester, The Laurel Review, Midwestern Gothic, Fried Chicken and Coffee, Atticus Review, Book of Matches, and Prime Number Magazine. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is a seven-time winner of the JD Supra Reader’s Choice Award for his writing in the legal technology industry. He currently lives with his wife, Brittany, in Minneapolis.
“Not Dark Yet unfurls like a fantastic roll of film capturing the hidden pockets of wonder in the lives of the denizens of James Alan Gill’s Illinois town of Matin. People fall in and out of love, race cars, make friends, make tracks, as ordinary lives reveal the extraordinary, all the while wrestling with the fundamental question, Can you really live the life you want and still please the people who love you?”—Whitney Otto, New York Times Bestselling Author of How to Make an American Quilt and Eight Girls Taking Pictures.
“Gill writes, with grace and humor and pain, about small-town life. This evocative chronicle of plain lives in crisis belongs on the same shelf as the stories of Bobbie Ann Mason and Raymond Carver. Poignant and powerful.”—Benjamin Percy, author of The Ninth Metal, Red Moon, and Thrill Me.

This program and others like this would not be possible without your financial help for which, as always, Pat Conroy Literary Center gratefully thanks you.

June 2025 Open Mic Night
2025-06-12 18:00 - 19:30 | Pat Conroy Literary Center, 601 Bladen Street, Beaufort, SC, 29902, United States
The Pat Conroy Literary Center’s monthly Open Mic Night will be held at the Conroy Center (601 Bladen St.) on Thursday, June 12, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. For National Poetry Month, Open Mic Night will feature local novelist Doris E. Wright, author of Cabbagehead. Open Mic will also include short readings of 3 to 5 minutes each by other writers in many genres.
When: Thursday, June 12, 2025 at 6 PM – 7:30 PM EDT
Price: Free · Duration: 1 hr 30 min
Where: Conroy Center (601 Bladen St.)
Interested in reading as part of Open Mic? Let us know at contact@patconroyliterarycenter.org
We want to build our community of writers and an appreciation for the art and talent of new, emerging, and long-time writers. Thank you for supporting this partnership!
Event Facebook Page
About our featured author:
Doris E. Wright is an award-winning author whose fiction and nonfiction stories have been published in several anthologies. She is a mother, grandmother, wife, artist and writer. Always curious about what’s beyond the next bend, she has ridden camels in Timbuktu, done tai chi in Xi’an, and walked the veld in Kwazulu-Natal. To facilitate her and her husband’s love of travel, especially on the cheap, they have pet sat dogs, cats, tarantulas, rats, a tortoise, and both normal and unusual plants in the U.S., France, Ireland, and the U.K.
“Cabbagehead by Doris E. Wright will have you wondering if plants have a life, and if they can intervene in our lives in ways we’ve not yet fathomed. Readers will love Wright’s deft skill with words, her ability to move the story along, and her ability to keep us in suspense. Dry wit, the suspense over the next revelation in the vegetable dilemma, and Wright’s other writerly gifts will keep you reading. It’s a story for anyone who’s experienced family estrangement or lost themselves in nature anywhere.”–Estelle Ford-Williamson, author of Rising Fawn

This program and others like this would not be possible without your financial help for which, as always, Pat Conroy Literary Center gratefully thanks you.
