An Evening with Appalachian authors Halle Hill and Terry Roberts, April 16

Spend an evening with Appalachian authors Halle Hill and Terry Roberts on February 20, 7:00 p.m., at the East Tennessee History Center. Hill and Roberts will present the Wilma Dykeman Stokely Memorial Lecture, moderated by Natalie Graham, professor and head of UT’s Department of Africana Studies.

The event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Friends of the Knox County Public Library and the John C. Hodges Society of the University of Tennessee Libraries.

Halle Hill’s collection of short stories, Good Women, was published in 2023. Terry Roberts’s eighth novel is scheduled for release in August. Both authors — in their own ways — address issues of faith, struggle, resilience, and redemption.

In Good Women Hill delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South: a woman boards a Greyhound bus barreling toward Florida to meet her sugar daddy’s mother; a state fair employee considers revenge on a local preacher; a sister struggles with guilt as she helps her brother plan to run away with a man he’s seeing in secret; a young woman who works for a scam for-profit college navigates the lies she sells for a living. The book showcases the interior lives of these women who are near their breaking points and the lengths they go through to find redemption. 

Good Women was named a 2023 Best Book of the Year by several literary journals.

Born and raised in East Tennessee, Hill currently lives, works, and teaches in North Carolina. 

Terry Roberts is a lifelong teacher, educational reformer and award-winning novelist. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where he is the director of the National Paideia Center.

A native of the mountains of Western North Carolina, his ancestors include six generations of the mountain farmers, bootleggers, and preachers who appear in his novels.

In his 2018 novel The Holy Ghost and Speakeasy and Revival, the reverend Jedidiah Robbins’s traveling revival company rides the rails of 1920s Appalachia. In addition to offering the gifts of the Holy Spirit, Robbins delivers spirits of another kind — the best whiskey the mountain stills have to offer. According to fellow novelist Ron Rash, the novel “transcends mere satire to become much more. Ultimately, The Holy Ghost Speakeasy and Revival contemplates complex questions of faith and morality in a world ripe with hypocrisy.”

Roberts also has been called “the master of Appalachian noir” for his Stephen Robbins Chronicles featuring Asheville’s own crime fighter.

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The annual  Wilma Dykeman Stokely Memorial Lecture is hosted by the Friends of the Knox County Public Library and the John C. Hodges Society of the University of Tennessee Libraries. The lecture honors the late Wilma Dykeman Stokely (1920–2006), writer, speaker, teacher, historian, environmentalist, and long-time friend of the Knox County Public Library. Her papers are part of the Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Tennessee Libraries. Speakers at the Wilma Dykeman Stokely Memorial Lecture represent a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and work, but all have a deep connection to one or more of Stokely’s passions: Appalachia, the environment, and racial and gender equity.