The Pat Conroy Literary Center's monthly Open Mic Night will be presented as a virtual event, live-streamed to our Facebook page, on Thursday, September 11, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. Our featured presenter is novelist Laura Leigh Morris, author of The Stone Catchers. Open Mic will also feature short readings of 3 to 5 minutes each by other writers in many genres, with host Melissa Whiteford St. Clair.
Interested in reading as part of virtual Open Mic? Let us know at
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About Our Featured Author:
Laura Leigh Morris is the author of The Stone Catchers: A Novel (2024), a finalist for the 2024 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, and Jaws of Life: Stories (2018). She's previously published short fiction and essays in STORY Magazine, North American Review, The Florida Review, and other journals. She teaches creative writing and literature at Furman University in Greenville, SC. To learn more, visitwww.lauraleighmorris.com.
"Laura Leigh Morris pulls her readers deep into a community experiencing generational tragedy and with eagle-eyed attention to the fine grain of human foible and capacity, charts the path through the tempest. In a world where on a daily basis we see our humanity reduced and our storytelling pinched, The Stone Catchers is a precious gift. Morris has given us a compelling, addictive narrative, shot through with a compassion validated by her unflinching gaze and measured, magisterial prose. The Stone Catchers is a marvel. Morris takes one of the toughest subjects to contemplate—a mass shooting—and in lucid prose limns how all of us are beset by pressure that results in questionable decisions. Morris unpacks what it is to be human, her deadly accuracy matched by her consummate delicacy."--Robert Gipe, author of Pop: An Illustrated Novel
"In The Stone Catchers, Laura Leigh Morris does the thing most Americans refuse to do: She stays with the victims of gun violence long after the twenty-four-hour news cycle has ended. She shows us how the trauma of a school shooting reverberates through a community—not just for the victims themselves, but for all those who feel the effects of their trauma. She does not let us do the thing we most want to do, what we do again and again, which is look away. She demands that we look. That we reckon. That we implicate ourselves in the violence that plays out far too often in our country."--Neema Avashia, author of Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place
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