Friday, March 28, 2025 – 2:00-3:30 PM EDT
Price: Free
Registration: Register at Eventbrite by March 27
Venue: Penn Center’s Frissell Hall, 16 Penn Center West, St. Helena Island
Website: Facebook Event Page
The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center will host an afternoon with novelists Jeffrey Blount (Mr. Jimmy from Around the Way) and John Pruitt (Tell It True), in conversation with Rebecca Dwight Bruff (Trouble the Water) on Friday, March 28, at 2:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public, this special event is presented in partnership with Luxe Lowcountry Travel and will be held at Penn Center’s Frissell Hall, 16 Penn Center West, St. Helena Island. Books by all three authors will be available for sale and signing.
Advance registration is required by March 27 at: https://blountandpruitt.eventbrite.com
About Jeffrey Blount and Mr. Jimmy from Around the Way
Jeffrey Blount is the award-winning author of three novels. He is also an Emmy award-winning television director and a 2016 inductee to the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame. During a 34-year career at NBC News, Jeffrey directed a decade of Meet the Press and was the first African-American to direct the Today show. He is an award-winning documentary scriptwriter for films and interactives that are now on display in the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture.
Mr. Jimmy from Around the Way is a story about failure, self-discovery, empowerment, and the possibility of redemption. James Henry Ferguson doesn’t belong here. After a highly publicized fall from grace, James attempts to flee from the chaos in his life. He ends up in a community he had never heard of before, one that has been neglected and ignored by everyone in rural Ham, Mississippi. A place of abject poverty, the neighborhood is commonly referred to as “Around the Way.” Within a place forgotten by the rest of the world, politics can be a dangerous game. When a troubling discovery is made, the entire neighborhood is rocked to its core and James is forced to confront his own past in order to help the community have a future. He will have to find the strength to fight for the neighbors he once disregarded and avert a heart-breaking disaster. A self-identified failure is forced to uncover the wisdom of his past in order to recognize that money can’t solve every problem. Full of never-ending twists and turns, no one can prepare themselves for the surprises in store. Winner of the 2024 National Indie Excellence Award for African American Fiction, 2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards for African American Fiction, 2024 NYC Big Book Award for General Fiction, and 2024 American Book Fest Best Book Award for African American Fiction.
“This tender story is for any of us who have fallen and found the only way up is by reaching out a hand to others.”—Cassandra King, author of Tell Me a Story: My Life with Pat Conroy
About John Pruitt and Tell It True
John Pruitt began his journalism career in 1964 as a television reporter-cameraman and eventually rose to top anchor at WSB-TV in Atlanta, Georgia. For a half-century he covered the civil rights movement, Georgia politics, and the major news figures of the day. His reporting has been honored with multiple awards including induction into the Atlanta Press Club and Georgia Association of Broadcasters Halls of Fame.
In Tell It True, An African American serviceman is gunned down on a rural Georgia road in July 1964. This shocking murder ensnares a wide range of characters including the journalists who cover it, the lawmen who must solve it, the civil rights leaders who capitalize upon it, the politicians who exploit it, and the Atlanta magnate who fears its impact on the New South image he desperately wants to protect. TV news cameraman Gil Matthews and AP reporter Mindy Williams team up to follow the twists and turns of the murder investigation as rural, state, and federal lawmen clash, a civil rights leader fends off a black power challenger, and voters take sides in a governor’s race pitting virulent racist Roscoe Pike against moderate underdog Harrison Parker. Focusing on the challenges faced by journalists as they covered a societal revolution and brought the dramatic and sometimes violent scenes to TV screens around the world, Tell It True takes us to a time when the future of the South hung in the balance.
“Pruitt takes us back to a time where black lives truly didn’t matter in the South, but it was a time black votes began to matter. The characters in this novel tell the story of the media’s role in changing race relations in the South, and the behind-the-scenes political alliances that helped to bring change. Pruitt’s meticulous character development and scenery depiction put me right there in the story. Gripping from beginning to end and hard to put down.”—Monica Kaufman Pearson, journalist and former news anchor
About Rebecca Dwight Bruff
Rebecca Bruff is the author of the award-winning historical novel Trouble the Water and the children’s book Stars of Wonder. Bruff earned her bachelor’s degree in education at Texas A&M and a master’s and doctorate in theology at Southern Methodist University. In 2017, she was a scholarship recipient for the prestigious Key West Literary Seminar. A frequent presenter at literary events, she volunteers at the Pat Conroy Literary Center.
