Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute will host Susan Gregg Gilmore, author of The Funeral Dress, for its 2017 Laurette LePrevost Writers Symposium.
The college will host a reading and discussion session with Gilmore on Thursday, March 30 at 12 p.m. on CCC&TI’s Watauga Campus and at 7 p.m. at the J.E. Broyhill Civic Center in Lenoir. On Friday, March 31, the college will host a reading and discussion with Gilmore at 12 p.m. in the gym on the Caldwell Campus in Hudson. All events are free and open to the public.
Susan Gregg Gilmore was born in Nashville, Tenn. and began her writing career at the University of Virginia as a reporter for the school’s award-winning newspaper, The Cavalier Daily. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in History at the University of Virginia and went on to earn her Master of Arts in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Over the course of her career, she has worked for the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor and the Chattanooga News-Free Press. While on staff at the Free Press, Gregg Gilmore wrote a weekly column about parenting in the South.
Her debut novel, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen was a USA TODAY bestseller and Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) 2009 Book Award Nominee. Gregg Gilmore’s second novel, The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove was named a 2010 SIBA Summer OKRA Pick and selected as part of Target’s Emerging Author Program. Her most recent work, The Funeral Dress, was called “a revelatory novel that offers an evocative account of the lives of Appalachian working women” by Kirkus Reviews and was selected for Target’s Emerging Author Program as well as named a Target Recommended Read. Susan Gregg Gilmore currently lives in Chattanooga, Tenn. with her family and two dogs.
Many CCC&TI students are reading Gregg Gilmore’s novel, The Funeral Dress, this semester as part of the English and Reading curriculum.
Laurette LePrevost, former Dean of Arts and Sciences for CCC&TI, was instrumental in building the Writers Symposium into an annual event that has brought in such renowned writers as Maya Angelou, Ernest Gaines, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Morgan and Clyde Edgerton. Under her leadership and guidance, CCC&TI’s symposium has become the longest-running consecutively held Writers Symposium in western North Carolina and one of the longest in the Southeast. The Writers Symposium series was renamed in her honor when she retired in 2004.
Support for the Laurette LePrevost Writers Symposium is provided by the Foundation of Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute. For more information on CCC&TI’s Laurette LePrevost Writers Symposium, call 828-726-2321.
