Pat Conroy Literary Center

Pat Conroy Book Club: The Prince of Tides
2023-08-24 18:30 - 19:30 (America/New_York) | The Rhett House Inn, 1009 Craven St., Beaufort, SC, 29902, United States
Thursday August 24, 2023 – 6:30-7:30 PM EDT
Price: $10
Registration: Register at Eventbrite | Limited to 20 participants
Venue: The Rhett House Inn | 1009 Craven St., Beaufort
Website: Facebook Event Page
The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center and the award-winning Rhett House Inn will host a monthly book club discussion of Pat Conroy’s dozen books in order of publication, moderated by Charlene Spearen and Jonathan Haupt. Book discussions will be held on fourth Thursdays beginning at 6:30 p.m. Limited to 20 participants each month. $10/person. Advance registration required. Participants are expected to read the books and to come prepared to discuss them.
Discussions will be held at The Rhett House Inn (1009 Craven St., Beaufort)
SCHEDULE

August 24: The Prince of Tides (1986)
September 28: Beach Music (1995)
October 26 (Pat Conroy’s birthday): My Losing Season (2002)
November 30 (5th Thursday due to Thanksgiving): The Pat Conroy Cookbook (2004)

Register at Eventbrite
ABOUT OUR DISCUSSION LEADERS
Dr. Charlene Monahan Spearen received her MFA degree in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric from the University of South Carolina. She is currently serving as the Public Relations and Special Projects Coordinator for Penn Center after a successful career in academia at Allen University. She served as the Program Coordinator for the University of South Carolina’s Arts Institute and was the Assistant Director for the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. In addition to her work throughout the Carolinas, Spearen has been a featured reader and Creative Writing instructor and scholar in County Monaghan and County Mayo, Ireland. She has published a full-length collection of poems titled A Book of Exquisite Disasters. Her poems have appeared in journals and publications throughout the United States.
Jonathan Haupt is the executive director of the nonprofit Conroy Center and the former director of the University of South Carolina Press, where he created the Story River Books fiction imprint with Pat Conroy, named by Garden & Gun magazine as one of “the top ten things to love about the South.” Haupt’s book reviews and author interviews have appeared in the Charleston Post and Courier, Lowcountry Weekly, Beaufort Lifestyle, Savannah Morning News’ Beacon magazine, Southern Review of Books, and Southern Writers Magazine’s Suite T blog. He is co-editor of the anthology Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy, the recipient of seventeen book awards. He serves on the boards of the Friends of South Carolina Libraries and the South Carolina Academy of Authors. In 2020, Haupt was recognized with the Doug Marlette Literacy Leadership Award presented by the Pulpwood Queens, the largest book club in the U.S.

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.

An Evening with Amy Paige Condon
2023-08-22 17:00 - 18:30 | Pat Conroy Literary Center, 601 Bladen Street, Beaufort, SC, 29902, United States
Tuesday August 22, 2023 – 5:00-6:30 PM EDT
Price: Free
Registration: Seating is limited; please call to reserve your spot: 843-379-7025.
Venue: Pat Conroy Literary Center | 601 Bladen St., Beaufort
Website: Facebook Event Page
The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center will host an evening with Amy Paige Condon, author of A Nervous Man Shouldn’t Be Here in the First Place: The Life of Bill Baggs, newly released in paperback. This free event will be held on Tuesday, August 22, at 5:00 p.m., at the Conroy Center (601 Bladen St., Beaufort). Books will be available for sale and signing. Please call to reserve your seat in advance: 843-379-7025.
About A Nervous Man Shouldn’t Be Here in the First Place
“This is not a simple life, my friend, and there are no simple answers.” The late editor of the late Miami News, Bill Baggs, stamped these words on plain white postcards and sent them to readers who sent him hate mail―a frequent occurrence, as Baggs, a white editor of a prominent southern newspaper, championed unpopular ideas in his front-page columns, such as protecting the environment, desegregating public schools, and peace in Vietnam.
Under his leadership, the Miami News earned three Pulitzer Prizes. For his stances, Baggs earned a bullet hole through his office window, police officers stationed outside his home, and a used Mercedes outfitted with a remote starter so that if it had been rigged with a bomb, it would blow up before he opened the door. Despite his causes and accomplishments, when Baggs died of pneumonia in 1969 at the age of forty-five, his story nearly died with him, and that would have been a travesty because Baggs still has so much to teach us about how to find the answers to those not-so-simple questions, like how to live in peace with one another?
In this first biography of this influential editor, Amy Paige Condon retraces how an orphaned boy from rural Colquitt, Georgia, bore witness and impacted some of the twentieth century’s most earth-shifting events: World War II, the civil rights movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. With keen intellect and sparkling wit, Baggs seemed to be in the right place at the right time. From bombardier to reporter then accidental diplomat, Baggs used his daily column as a bully pulpit for social justice and wielded his pen like a scalpel to reveal the truth.
“The marquee proclaiming the most celebrated journalists of the twentieth century probably wouldn’t include Bill Baggs. But ask everyone listed on the marquee who’s missing. By unanimous consent, they’d say Bill Baggs, the daring, fearless, ‘rapscallion’ editor of the Miami News. Why? Because as Amy Paige Condon so masterfully reveals, Baggs led them on race, Vietnam, the environment, historic preservation, land conservation, and the liberal conversation we’re still having today. This is a necessary resurrection of a departed journalist worth celebrating.”–Hank Klibanoff, Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation
“When a book keeps you riveted into the wee hours of the morning, and then brings tears to your eyes when it ends, you can be pretty sure it’s a winner.”–Carol McCabe Booker, editor of Alone Atop the Hill
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amy Paige Condon is the founder of the Refinery Writing Studio and the associate editor of Beacon, a quarterly news magazine published by the Savannah Morning News. She is the coauthor of Wiley’s Championship BBQ Cookbook and The Back in the Day Bakery Cookbook.

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.

August 2023 Open Mic Night
2023-08-10 18:00 - 19:30 | Sandies, 711 Bladen St., Beaufort, SC, 29902, United States
In partnership with the South Carolina Writers Association and the Beaufort County Black Chamber of Commerce, the Conroy Center’s monthly Open Mic Night will be held at Sandies (711 Bladen St.) on Thursday, August 10, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. Our featured writer is Ed Madden, past Poet Laureate of Columbia and author of the newly published collection A Pooka in Arkansas.
When: Thursday, August 10, 2023 at 6 PM – 7:30 PM EDT
Price: Free · Duration: 1 hr 30 min
Where: Sandies (711 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 writer:
Ed Madden is the author of four other books and four chapbooks of poetry, most recently Ark, about his father’s last months in hospice care, and So they can sing, which won the 2016 Robin Becker Chapbook Prize.
He is a professor of English and the former director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches Irish literature, queer studies, and creative writing. From 2015 through 2022, Ed has served as the poet laureate for the City of Columbia, SC. He is recipient of an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship and artist residencies at the Hambidge Center in Georgia and the Instituto Sacatar in Itaparica, Brazil.
“This book redeems the curse of where and what we are born into by conjuring spells. Bestial. Animistic. The poet strutting around like a mythic centaur, or if you like, a domestic ass. This book flies in the face of making the rough places plain and the crooked straight. You won’t have to have grown up queer in the deep rural South to be touched by the lyrical antics that go on here, this alternative gospel spreading its haunches till every knee bow, every tongue confess, this chorus of Hallelujah inflected/infected by its own down and dirty twang.”—Timothy Liu

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.

An Evening with USA Today Bestselling Author Leonard Goldberg
2023-08-09 17:00 - 18:30 | NeverMore Books, 910 Port Republic St, Beaufort, SC, 29902, United States
Wednesday August 9, 2023 – 5:00-6:30 PM EDT
Price: Free
Registration: Call the bookstore to reserve your seat: 843-812-9460
Location: Nevermore Books | 910 Port Republic St, Beaufort
“A testament to the power of deductive reasoning…. Goldberg brings his characters vibrantly to life… a worthy successor to Conan Doyle’s original.”―Charleston Post and Courier
NeverMore Books and the Pat Conroy Literary Center will host an evening with USA Today bestselling mystery novelist Leonard Goldberg, author of The Wayward Prince (Book 7 in the Daughter of Sherlock Holmes Series), in conversation with Conroy Center executive director Jonathan Haupt. This free event will be held on Wednesday, August 9, at 5:00 p.m., at 910 Port Republic St, Beaufort. Books will be available for sale and signing. Call the bookstore to reserve your seat: 843-812-9460
Website: Facebook Event Page
ABOUT The Wayward Prince
During the height of the Great War, playboy Prince Harry, the third in line to the British throne, vanishes in thin air while horseback riding in Hyde Park. When his absence continues on for days, the royal family grows concerned and summons Scotland Yard, who can only recover scant, unrevealing clues. The concern deepens when MI5 decodes a recent message from German spies in London which speaks of a captured asset that will bring great embarrassment to the Crown. There is a strong belief within the Intelligence agency that plans are underway to transport the captive prince to Berlin without delay. Despite an intensive search, no trace of the royal can be detected.
With Scotland Yard and MI5 baffled, Joanna Holmes, daughter of the famed British detective, and the senior and younger Dr. Watsons are called in, and they soon find themselves entangled in a web of abortion, murder, treason, and spies, all of which is seemingly being orchestrated by an arch-enemy of the long-dead Sherlock Holmes. In their race to rescue Prince Harry, it becomes clear that the mastermind behind the maze of crimes has a singular motive in mind. He desires overdue revenge in the form of Joanna’s death.
“An appealing installment for franchise fans and newcomers alike.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“Goldberg amply demonstrates once again just how compelling a figure Joanna Holmes has become. Simply put, this series is one of the best continuations of the Sherlock mythos that one could hope for.”―Mystery Scene
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Leonard Goldberg is the USA Today bestselling author of the Joanna Blalock medical thrillers. His novels have been translated into a dozen languages and were selections of the Book of the Month Club, French and Czech book clubs, and The Mystery Guild. They were featured as People’s “Page-Turner of the Week” and at the International Book Fair. After a long career affiliated with the UCLA Medical Center as a Clinical Professor of Medicine, he now lives on an island off the coast of Charleston, SC.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Jonathan Haupt is the executive director of the Pat Conroy Literary Center, a frequent guest book reviewer for the Charleston Post and Courier, and co-editor of Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy, winner of 17 book awards.

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.

Children's Book Fair 2023
2023-08-08 10:00 - 14:00 | Port Royal Sound Foundation Weezie Educational Pavilion, 310 Okatie Hwy, Okatie, 29909
Tuesday August 8, 2023 – 10 am – 2 pm EDT
Price: Free · Duration: 4 hrs
Location: Port Royal Sound Foundation Weezie Educational Pavilion | 130 Okatie Hwy, Okatie, SC 29909
Website: Facebook Event Page
“A gorgeous book that will touch every child’s longing to connect with someone ‘out there’ who is like them.” Is how School Library Journal praised Indigo Dreaming, the newest picture book from award-winning children’s author Dinah Johnson. Indigo Dreaming is a meditation on place, wonder, and connectedness as experienced by two young girls on opposite sides of the Atlanta Ocean.
Dinah Johnson will be the special guest author at the Pat Conroy Literary Center’s annual Children’s Book Fair, to be held on Tuesday, August 8, from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. at the Port Royal Sound Foundation Weezie Educational Pavilion (130 Okatie Hwy, Okatie). Presented in partnership between the nonprofit Conroy Center, the Port Royal Sound Foundation, the Storybook Shoppe children’s bookstore, and DAYLO: Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization, this special event is free and open to the public.
Johnson will give a reading from Indigo Dreaming at 11:00 a.m. Student volunteers from DAYLO will be hosting a Teddy Bear Picnic read-aloud throughout the event.
Other participating authors and artists in the Children’s Book Fair are Patricia Bee, author of Try’umsee’s Wings; Bill Borg artist of Myrtle the Loggerhead Turtle; Rebecca Chamberlain, author and artist of Maralee & the Turtles of the Sea; Lisa Anne Cullen, author and artist of Haskel and Greta; Mary T. Jacobs, author of the Big Daddy Series; Ann Eilers Lilly, author of Scoot’s Savannah Rescue; Susan Montanari, author of My Dog’s a Chicken; Robin Prince Monroe, author of The Silent Glades; Sheree Richnow, author of Dixie the Rescue Dog Makes New Friends; Susan Diamond Riley, author of The Sea Witch’s Revenge; and Katherine Robinson, author of The Crabs on Calhoun.
All Hands on Deck, the student anthology from the 6th annual Camp Conroy will also make its debut at the Children’s Book Fair. And the Bluffton-based Storybook Shoppe will have a selection of other popular lowcountry children’s books available as well.
About the Featured Author:
Dinah Johnson is the award-winning author of many books for young readers, including H Is for Harlem, which received five starred reviews and was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and a Horn Book Fanfare title. Indigo Dreaming is her most recent book. A professor of English at the University of South Carolina, she lives in Columbia. Learn more at www.dinahjohnsonbooks.com.

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.
