Jeremy Jones presents Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries

Name: Jeremy Jones presents Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries
Start: 2025-10-09T18:00:00-04:00
Location: 3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779

Schedule

Thu, 09 Oct, 2025 at 06:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779 | Sylva, NC

Jeremy Jones visits City Lights on Thursday, October 9th at 6:00pm to share his new book, Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries.
Reading sections from Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries and playing Old Time tunes on his banjo, Jeremy Jones travels through time to open up the life of William Thomas Prestwood, an enigmatic 19th-century man who recorded his life—from the racy to the mundane—in coded, hand-sewn diaries. Through song and word, Jones explores what his fourth-great-grandfather’s deciphered life might reveal about our own lives today.
Jeremy B. Jones is the author of the memoir Cipher as well as Bearwallow, which was named the 2014 Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction and awarded gold in memoir in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards. His essays appear in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Oxford American, Appalachian Reckoning, and the Iowa Review. Born and raised in the mountains of North Carolina, Jeremy earned his MFA from the University of Iowa and now serves as an associate professor of English at Western Carolina University. He lives in Hendersonville, NC.