Tom Muir is the historic site manager at The Thomas Wolfe Memorial State Historic Site in downtown Asheville, North Carolina. Tom is a well-recognized  public historian. He enjoys promoting the study of history for public audiences outside the traditional classroom, as more and more people spend holidays, vacations, and their spare time seeking out history by choice: making pilgrimages to famous literary sites, to battlefields and memorials, visiting museums and researching their own family histories.

In his role at The Thomas Wolfe Memorial State Historic Site, Tom Muir is immersed in the autobiographical nature of Wolfe’s work.  

Throughout Thomas Clayton Wolfe’s literary career, he mined the early years of his life for his characters and stories. In his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe recounted the life of a young man born in western North Carolina, the son of a stonecutter and a woman who ran a boardinghouse. He once said the reason he wrote the book was to forget his own childhood. But he never did forget his experiences of growing up in the boardinghouse his mother ran in the mountain town of Asheville, North Carolina.

Tom Muir’s historical insights into Wolfe’s life provide further clarity, understanding and meaning to the great but perhaps enigmatic author’s work.

James Swain is a New York Times best selling author who lives in Odessa, Florida. Much of his writing has been informed by his interests and life in New York City, Florida, Las Vegas and New Jersey. Among his hobbies are gambling and gambling scams. Another is magic. Swain began doing magic as a kid; when he was 12, he and David Copperfield had the same magic teacher. Swain started writing almost as early, at 15, and studied the craft at New York University, Washington Square College, where his teachers included Ralph Ellison and Anatole Broyard. After graduating from NYU, he began working as a magazine editor and screenwriter. Following his move to Florida, he started an advertising firm, and his career began as a Florida novelist.

He has written twenty fiction and non-fiction books. Many have been translated for the international market.  Swain’s books have been declared “Mysteries of the Year” by Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews.

In Swain’s novel, Dark Magic, readers are introduced to Peter Warlock, a magician with a dark secret. At night, he entertains a New York City audience on stage with his mind-bending tricks and feats; by day, he’s involved with an underground organization of psychics who peer into the future. Praised by the master magician David Copperfield himself: “A darkly brilliant story of magic and witchcraft…”

Jim began his “Billy Cunningham” series by researching a story about poker hustling for Men’s Journal. The Billy Cunningham character is a morally principled, honest fellow who recruits his own team of hustlers to scam casinos.

Another series character “ Tony Valentine” is a retired cop from New Jersey who moved to Florida and makes a living using his consultant skills to guard against casino cheaters. The “Tony Valentine” series film rights were purchased under an agreement that allows Swain to write the first screenplay adaptation.

Perhaps the most Floridan of the character series is “Jack Carpenter” an ex-cop from South Florida who was terminated because of using excessive force. All Floridians share Florida as their home but Floridans (no ‘i’ after ‘d’) share something more; a heritage, ideology, dialect, and culture that is distinctly Southern. After being fired, Carpenter turns to work as private eye but the Miami Police still see him as an asset in difficult cases.

James Swain has received two nominations for the Barry Award and was awarded the Prix Calibre 38 for best American Crime Fiction and the Florida Book Award for fiction.

Robert Morgan is the Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell and an award-winning writer of bestselling historical novels, poetry, biography, American history, drama, short fiction and essays. “Robert Morgan is, by almost any measure, the most prolific and wide-ranging author ever to teach at Cornell,” said Roger Gilbert, professor of English.

Much of Morgan’s writing draws on his upbringing in the Blue Ridge Mountains and the rich history and landscape of Appalachia. His works include the Oprah’s Book Club selection “Gap Creek” (1999); “Chasing the North Star” (2016), a tale of two runaway slaves’ journey to Ithaca, and seven other novels; “Boone” (2007), a biography of frontiersman Daniel Boone (also a national bestseller); and 14 books of poetry, most recently ”Dark Energy” (2015). He received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007 and was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2010.

Of his many literary awards, Morgan has collected two named for fellow North Carolinian Thomas Wolfe – no small coincidence, as the iconic Southern writers also share a birthday.

Dr. James M. Hutchisson of Charleston, South Carolina, has 10 books and more than 60 articles of literary and historical criticism and nonfiction to his credit. Born in Washington, D.C., Jim Hutchisson received his Ph.D. from the University of Delaware. He served on the faculty of Washington and Jefferson College,  one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges, and as Professor of Southern Studies and American Literature at The Citadel in Charleston before retiring.

An expert on the history and culture of Charleston he has been interviewed by the BBC, ETV, and the Voice of America. Renaissance in Charleston, co-authored with Harlan Greene, features the city’s literary, artistic, and institutional flowering, beginning in 1920 and continuing through World War II, which came to be known as the Charleston Renaissance.

Dr. Hutchisson’s definitive biography of Edgar Allan Poe, entitled: POE, presents a critical overview of the Virginia gentleman’s themes, techniques, and imaginative preoccupations. Poe was born in 1809 in Boston, but he considered Richmond his home and even called himself “a Virginian.” It was in Richmond that Poe grew up, married, and first gained a national literary reputation. Dr. Hutchisson conveys Poe’s work as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger and how Poe won “plaudits across the country” for his creative style and innovative literary direction for the celebrated southern journal.

Dr. Hutchisson’s most recent book, Ernest Hemingway:  A New Life, was hailed by The Washington Post as a “deftly-written…gentler but sadder look at an American master.”  The National Review asserted, “Hutchisson has done the impossible: He has made an original contribution to the literature about the most written-about author in American letters.”   

Born in Jackson, Mississippi and raised on the Mississippi delta, Diane McPhail is the author of The Abolitionist’s Daughter. She now lives in Highlands, North Carolina. She is a member of North Carolina Writers’ Network and the Historical Novel Society. Based on true events and rooted in family history, Diane C. McPhail’s debut novel upends stereotypes of the Civil War South with a rare depiction of Southern Abolitionism during the family and national crisis that the Civil War wrought. The book opens in Greensboro, Mississippi in the year 1859. A slave auction has been scheduled. A young woman is begging her father to prevent the slave from being separated from his family. Restricted by Mississippi’s stringent slave laws, her father does the only thing he can do legally. He purchases the slaves and their two children and brings them to live at his home.

Diane is also a painter of regional renown. Her works appear in numerous private, corporate and university collections. Collectors range from Emory University to Halle Berry. Her 13 figure sculpture garden, penetralia, was commissioned as the center of Lenox Park in Atlanta.

Diane McPhail’s work is driven by a desire for inclusiveness through art in promoting social equity and religious diversity in our world today.

Dr. Bernard Powers is the founding director of the College of Charleston’s Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston (CSSC) and Professor Emeritus of History at the university. Bernard is an expert on African American history and culture and the role of slavery in American history.

Encompassing his academic career, Dr. Powers has published numerous books and articles including 1994’s Black Charlestonians:  A Social History 1822-1885, which examines the socioeconomic history of the city’s vibrant free Black population and the changes caused by emancipation after the Civil War.

On June 17, 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina, nine African Americans were killed during a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church; three victims survived. Following the tragedy Dr. Powers co-authored: We Are Charleston: Tragedy and Triumph at Mother Emanuel.

Professor Powers has appeared in several documentaries, including the PBS series African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross and 2019’s Emanuel: The Untold Story of the Victims and Survivors of the Charleston Church Shooting. His new book released by the University of South Carolina Press is entitled: 101 African Americans Who Shaped South Carolina. Our conversation with Bernie will touch upon his new book, recent developments at the CSSC and progress on the International African American Museum which is slated to open in downtown Charleston in 2022. Dr. Bernard Powers earned his Ph.D in American history at Northwestern University and has been a board member for the International African American Museum since its inception.

Jill Collins McCorkle was born in Lumberton, North Carolina. She graduated from The University of North Carolina and also attended Hollins College where she received her MA.

Jill McCorkle’s first two novels were released simultaneously when she was just out of college, and the New York Times called her “a born novelist.” Since then, she has published five novels and four collections of short stories, and her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories several times, as well as The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Five of her books have been New York Times Notable books, and her novel, Life After Life, was a New York Times bestseller. She has received the New England Booksellers Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, The Atlantic, and other publications. She was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard, where she also chaired the department of creative writing. She is currently a faculty member of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and is affiliated with the MFA program at North Carolina State University.

Rebecca Makkai, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Great Believer has said of Jill’s latest novel, Hieroglyphics: “Jill McCorkle has long been one of our wryest, warmest, wisest storytellers. In Hieroglyphics, she takes us on through decades, through loss, through redemption, and lands in revelation and grace…and it’s spectacular.”

Raised in the community of Bethesda, near Durham, NC, Clyde has published ten novels, a book of advice (Papadaddy’s Book for New Fathers) and a memoir (Solo, My Adventures in the Air).

The Night Train, his tenth novel, was published by Little, Brown in 2011 and received multiple starred reviews. In the New York Times review entitled: A Novel of Jazz, Soul and Civil Rights, Adam Mansbach writes: “What “The Night Train” captures with precision is the manner in which an entire community, black and white, edges toward a new racial reality — bound not by a common will but by a common geography. The biggest moments in this engaging tale are small, and relentlessly upbeat: intimacy trumps bigotry, music expands minds, violence is averted where 10 years earlier it would have been all but assured.”

Three of his novels have been made into movies: Raney, Walking Across Egypt, and Killer Diller.

Stage adaptations have been made from Raney, Walking Across Egypt, The Floatplane Notebooks, Killer Diller, Where Trouble Sleeps, Lunch at the Piccadilly, and The Bible Salesman.

His short stories and essays have been published in New York Times Magazine, Best American Short Stories, Southern Review, Oxford American, Garden & Gun and other publications.

Clyde, is also a talented musician, and has performed with musical artists including Jim Watson, Mike Craver, Jack King, and Matt Kendrick. Clyde’s audio albums and CDs include most recently The Bible Salesman, music and story, with Mike Craver.