Thursday, June 5, 2025 – 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, in partnership with NeverMore Books, will host an evening with acclaimed fiction writer Julia Elliott, author of the newly published story collection Hellions—named a TIME Best Book of the Month and a Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year—on Thursday, June 5, at 5:00 p.m., at the Conroy Center (601 Bladen St., Beaufort). Elliott will be in conversation with Conroy Center executive director Jonathan Haupt and DAYLO student leader E Achurch.
Free and open to the public. Books will be available for sale and signing through NeverMore Books. Seating is limited; please call in advance to reserve: 843-379-7025.
ABOUT THE BOOK
From the acclaimed author of The Wilds comes an electric story collection that blends folklore, fairy tales, Southern Gothic, and horror, reveling in the collision of the familiar with the wildly surreal.
In a plague-stricken medieval convent, a nun works on a forbidden mystic manuscript, pining for Christ’s love. During a long, muggy July in rural South Carolina, an adolescent girl finds unexpected power as her family obsesses over the horror film The Exorcist. On the outskirts of a Southern college town, a young woman resists the tyranny of a shape-shifting older professor as she develops her own sorceress skills. And at a feminist art colony in the North Carolina mountains, a group of mothers contends with the supernatural talents their children have picked up from a pair of mysterious orphans who live in the woods.
With exuberance, ferocity, and astounding imagination, Julia Elliott’s Hellions jumps from the occult to the comic, from the horrific to the wondrous, presenting earthbound characters who long for the otherworldly.
“Intoxicating, fantasy-tinged. . . . Elliott’s rich and magical landscape will pull readers in.”―Publishers Weekly
“Bewitching. . . . Gothic, atmospheric, and filled with the lavish symbolism contained in the natural world.”―Booklist
“A genius at the short-story form, Julia Elliott achieves new highs with the astonishing Hellions. Beautiful, visceral, surprising stories, both wild and dangerous, with a Southern twang but universal appeal…. One of my favorite collections of the past few years.”―Jeff VanderMeer, author of Absolution
“Julia Elliott’s fiction is its own country. Every sentence drips and unsettles, every character lusts and schemes, every landscape is alien and forbidding. But there is something eerily familiar pulsing underneath the wildness―the way your waking life snakes through the logic of your dreams. I am obsessed with these lush, feral stories.”―Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julia Elliott is the author of the story collection The Wilds, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and the novel The New and Improved Romie Futch (both from Tin House). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, and the New York Times. She has won a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. She teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina and lives in Columbia with her husband, daughter, and five hens.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWERS
Jonathan Haupt is the executive director of the nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center, the past director of the University of South Carolina Press, and co-editor of the anthology Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy, winner of 17 book awards. He is a frequent guest book reviewer for the Charleston Post and Courier and a mentor to the student leaders of DAYLO: Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization.
E Achurch is sophomore at the Complete Student, where she is founding president of her school’s chapter of DAYLO: The Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization. She is a counselor for the Conroy Center’s Camp Conroy summer writing and art program and a past participant in the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities summer creative writing program.
