The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center will host an evening with novelists Robert Gwaltney and Bren McClain, on Thursday, April 23, at 5:00 p.m., at the Conroy Center (601 Bladen St., Beaufort). Books will be available for sale and signing. Seating is limited for this free event; please call in advance to reserve: 843-379-7025.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ROBERT GWALTNEY
Robert Gwaltney is the author of Sing Down the Moon (Mercer University Press, 2026) and The Cicada Tree (Moonshine Cove Publishing, 2022), works of Southern literary fiction that explore inheritance, identity, and the fragile boundary between the living and the dead. Rooted in the landscapes and histories of the American South, his writing blends the gothic tradition with elements of magical realism to illuminate the forces that shape who we become.
Raised in Cairo, Georgia, alongside three younger brothers in the rash-inducing subtropical heat of the region, Gwaltney is a lifelong resident of the South — a circumstance that has left an indelible mark on his voice as a writer. Sense of place remains central to his work, where memory, myth, and longing intertwine.
By day, he serves as Vice President of Easterseals North Georgia, championing early childhood literacy and strengthening families at critical stages of development. In all the hours between, he writes.
He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his partner.
BREN McCLAIN
I got set for life at the age of three. My two loves – writing and animals – were born.
My daddy tells me I can’t possibly remember. But I do. The pickup truck had wooden railings around the back, and it came around the side of our house. I was standing by our kitchen table, watching out the window. Inside those railings was our milk cow. I called her Mama Red. And she was leaving.
I had no idea back then that what I had witnessed and felt that day with that milk cow would shape me as a writer.
Fast forward through getting a BA in English from Furman University in Greenville, SC, and teaching high school English for one year. Writing drew me again, but this time as a journalist, writing for my hometown newspaper, The Anderson Daily Mail; working as a radio reporter, and as a television reporter and anchor at various stations across the Southeast. But then I switched to corporate America, where I became desperate to be creative and picked up a legal pad – oh yes, I remember the date, September 18, 1988 – and began writing a short story called “Desperation Dance.”
I’ll cover a lot of ground fast here: I wrote two failed novels, got a literary agent, lost a literary agent. But, when I returned to what was set in motion in a three-year-old Anderson, South Carolina, farm girl – writing and animals – my literary career changed, and my novel, One Good Mama Bone, was born. I even went so far as to write about a mama cow. I named her Mama Red. And I love her. My heart first opened with that milk cow.
Things I wanted to say but couldn’t get worked in:
-2017 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction
-2019 Patricia Winn Award for Southern Literature
-Long-listed for the Southern Book Prize, Southeastern Independent Booksellers Association
-A 2017 Great Group Reads selection by the Women’s National Book Association
-Named top book of 2017 by Lit Picks
-A Southern Independent Booksellers Association Okra Pick
Finalist for The Crook’s Corner Book Prize for a debut novel set in the American South
-Named Pulpwood Queen Book of the Year 2017
-An excerpt from One Good Mama Bone was named a 2012 Finalist for the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Award for a
Novel-in-Progress.
-South Carolina Arts Commission awarded me the Fiction Fellowship in 2005.
I’m a two-time winner of the South Carolina Fiction Project (2003 and 2007).
I grew up on a seventy-two acre beef cattle and grain farm in Anderson, South Carolina.
I have a twin, and, to this day, we’re known as “the McClain twins.” Which is fine by me.
I’m at work on my next novel, Took, which features another farm animal, chickens. Happy to say it has won the 2016 William Faulkner-William Wisdom prize for Novel-in-Progress.
