Wildacres Writers Workshop Panel

ABOUT THE EVENT

Join us for a panel featuring threea uthors from the . Please RSVP to help us get a headcount for seats and books. Books will be available for purchase at the event. The authors will be available to sign and personalize books after the program.

All live author events are subject to change. More information about our events can be found at quailridgebooks.com/eventsfaq.

ABOUT THE BOOKS & AUTHORS

THE MARRIAGE BED by Tommy Hays

A freak accident comes on the heels of a startling revelation—laying bare the foundation of a marriage, and a husband is left to grapple with the aftermath.

A poetry professor at a small college in Asheville, NC, Asa Flowers, comes home one stormy evening to find his wife Betsy inexplicably distraught. As the evening goes on, the couple end up in a heated argument that sends Asa to sleep out in their garage apartment for the first time in twenty-five years of marriage. The next morning, he wakes to blue sky and an altered world.

Unfolding over a few tense weeks and told from multiple points of view, this novel explores how a tragedy can assume as many shapes as the people it touches. Asa finds himself reckoning with torn feelings about his marriage and confusion about how to proceed in his complicated relationships with his adult children. As he gradually absorbs revelations—so much he didn't know or understand during his long marriage—he finds himself drawn uneasily toward a new world, one in which he must shed much of his old identity if he is to survive, and more important, rededicate himself to being a father.

TOMMY HAYS is an acclaimed Southern writer, whose fiction grows out of his emotional connections to places he’s lived and known—Greenville, South Carolina; Asheville, North Carolina; and Atlanta. His novels are The Pleasure Was Mine (St. Martin’s Press 2005), In the Family Way (Random House, 1999), Sam’s Crossing (Atheneum 1992), and YA novel What I Came to Tell You (Egmont, USA 2013). He has published stories, profiles and book reviews in magazines, newspapers and literary journals such as Redbook, Our State, The Atlanta Constitution, The Charlotte Observer, Smoky Mountain Living, Still:The Journal, The Chattahoochee Review, and storySouth. The winner of many literary awards, he is founder and former Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program, UNC Asheville’s community writing program as well as Lecturer Emeritus in the Master of Liberal Arts program. He is based in Asheville, NC.

The Creek, The Crone, and the Crow by Leah Weiss

An outsider to the Carolina hills inherits a gift that could change everything for her beloved creek town on the verge of dying out, from an author of whom NPR said writes "with a deep knowledge of the enduring myths of Appalachia...vividly portraying real people and sorrows."

Summer, 1980. Kate Shaw has lived in Baines Creek for ten years, teaching at a one-room schoolhouse on the brink of closure. A skeptic by heart, she rejects superstition and the belief in Appalachian folklore, much to the chagrin of Birdie Rocas, a lively and reclusive witch with a trove of secrets. Yet when Birdie dies and leaves Kate her Book of Truths and a trunk of illuminated manuscripts and journals, Kate is thrown into a mystery, overwhelmed by a collection that spans centuries back to Scotland.

Enter Lydia Brown, a psychic with a curious birthmark whose visions stopped the day her parents died. Grief-stricken, without her gift, and in need of spiritual guidance, she travels to Appalachia in search of Birdie. From there, the two women’s stories intertwine, as they investigate the questions surrounding Birdie’s death and legacy, through secret rooms, underground tunnels, and back country graveyards.

LEAH WEISS is an acclaimed southern author who has published three books in her 70s: If The Creek Don’t Rise, All The Little Hopes, and The Creek, The Crone and The Crow. Her books have been Library Reads, Indie Next and a SIBA Okra Pick. They were honored as finalists for the Library of Virginia’s Literary Awards and nominated for the Southern Book Prize. Her third novel is a return to Appalachia and Baines Creek and is told by beloved characters from the first two books. Her books have sold more than 250,000 copies.

In the Dark Eyes of the Rabbit by Debra Daniel

In the Dark Eyes of the Rabbit, the 2025 Winner of the International Bath Novella-in-Flash Award, is the coming-of-age story of Retta who, at twelve, is both wise and naïve, optimistic and full of doom, innocent yet sassy as she attempts to make sense of her family and life in general. It is the 1960s and the world is changing. Retta is absolutely ready yet dreading every minute of it. The interworking of her family makes for a contradictory existence for a girl trying to blossom onto the teenage stage where she wants to kiss boys, sing gloriously for adoring audiences, and figure out the confusing behavior of her parents, all the while dodging the threat of certain untimely death that her grandmother foresees as ordinary daily occurrences.

DEBRA A. DANIEL is the 2025 winner of the Bath Novella-in-Flash award for, In the Dark Eyes of the Rabbit, and has previously published novellas-in-flash, A Family of Great Falls and The Roster, Woman Commits Suicide in Dishwasher and poetry chapbooks, The Downward Turn of August and As Is. She’s a Pushcart and Best Short Fictions nominee, has been longlisted and shortlisted in numerous competitions, and has won The Los Angeles Review short fiction prize. She was twice named SC Arts Commission Poetry Fellow, won the Guy Owen Poetry Prize, as well as awards from the Poetry Society of SC. She sings in a band with her husband and was once on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

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