Randolph library Friends to host novelist Wiley Cash

Wiley Cash -- photo by
Mallory Brady Cash

ASHEBORO – Tickets are on sale now for a talk by New York Times bestselling author Wiley Cash during a luncheon at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, September 25, at Pinewood Country Club, sponsored by the Friends of the Randolph County Public Library.

Tickets are $25 and can be purchased at the Asheboro Public Library, 201 Worth Street. The ticket price covers the cost of lunch.

Cash, who lives in Wilmington, will talk about his most recent novel, The Last Ballad, which focuses on heroic women and men of the labor movement in the textile mills of Gastonia during the early 20th century who risked their lives to secure basic rights for workers.

Cash’s first novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, became a bestseller. It was named a New York Ties Notable Book of the Year and received multiple awards, including the Southern Independent Booksellers Book Award.

A North Carolina native, Cash is writer in residence at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and has held residency positions at Yaddo (an artists’ retreat in New York) and the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire.

Asheboro Sunset lecture series to feature embedded journalist Kevin Maurer

Kevin Maurer

NOTE: This event has been rescheduled to 7 p.m. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, due to Hurricane Florence.

ASHEBORO – Nearly a decade spent reporting on the experiences of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan eventually put award-winning journalist Kevin Maurer atop the bestseller list as co-author of No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden, with a Navy SEAL who was present when bin Laden was killed.

Maurer will talk about his experiences with the book and as an embedded journalist with U.S. troops around the world in the concluding talk of the 2018 Friends of the Library Sunset Signature Series at 7 p.m. Thursday, September 13, at the Sunset Theatre in downtown Asheboro.

Maurer’s appearance is free and the public is invited. The series is sponsored by the Heart of North Carolina Visitors Bureau, the City of Asheboro and the Friends of the Randolph County Public Library.

The format of the talk will be a conversation between Maurer and Mike Adams of Asheboro. Adams was editor of The Fayetteville Observer in 2003 when he hired Maurer to cover the newspaper’s military beat.

Shortly after joining the Observer, Maurer followed the 82nd Airborne Division during the initial invasion of Iraq. He returned to cover the soldiers more than a dozen times, most recently in 2010 when he spent 10 weeks with a Special Forces team in Afghanistan. He has also embedded with American soldiers in east Africa and Haiti.

No Easy Day, written with SEAL Mark Owen (a pen-name for Matt Bissionnette), spent several weeks atop the New York Times Best Seller List and became the best selling hardback book of the year.

Owen and Maurer followed No Easy Day with No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy Seal in 2014, a New York Times bestseller. Last year, Maurer co-authored American Radical: Inside the World of An Undercover Muslim FBI Agent with Tamer Elnoury, which also landed on the bestseller list.

Other books he has co-authored include Lions of Kandahar: The Story of a Fight Against All Odds with Rusty Bradley; No Way Out: A Story of Valor in the Mountains of Afghanistan with Pulitzer Prize winner Mitch Weiss; and Hunting Che: How A U.S. Special Forces Team Helped Capture the World’s Most Famous Revolutionary, also with Weiss.

Based in Wilmington, Maurer is a native of Virginia Beach, Va., and a graduate of Old Dominion University.

The Sunset Theatre is located at 234 Sunset Avenue. For further information, call 800-626-2672.

Explore Southern cuisine in Asheboro library talk

John J. Beck

ASHEBORO – Southern cuisine is a blend of the traditions and ingredients of three cultures: Native Americans, British settlers, and people from west and central Africa. 

Elon University history professor Dr. John J. Beck will explore how those influences merged to form a common cuisine — though with many variations — from Virginia to Texas in “Southern Cooking, High and Low: A Short History of the Cuisine of the South,” at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, August 14, at the Asheboro library.

Beck’s talk, sponsored by the library’s Margaret C. Taylor Memorial Culinary Arts Collection, is free and the public is invited.

Beck notes that traditional Southern fare was created and cooked at home rather than fostered by restaurants — whether in the houses of affluent families by African American women before and after the Civil War, or for the social events of less well-to-do people, such as church picnics, wakes and family reunions.

Now Southern food is being taken in new directions by professional chefs who approach the cuisine with the same reverence that they have treated French and other celebrated cooking traditions.

Beck holds a Ph.D. in American history from UNC-Chapel Hill with a specialty in Southern history. He is co-author of Southern Culture: An Introduction and is currently working on a history of Southern food.

He retired from a career in the North Carolina Community College System, last serving as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Granville Community College.

The library is located at 201 Worth Street. For further information, call 336-318-6803.