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By the Book with David Wright Faladé and Phoebe Zerwick

Thu, Jun 15, 2023
Greensboro History Museum

David Wright Faladé, author and filmmaker about North Carolina’s Outer Banks, will be speaking at the Greensboro History Museum on Thursday, June 15 at 6 pm as part of the By the Book Series. He will be in conversation with Wake Forest University professor Phoebe Zerwick, author of Beyond Innocence: The Life Sentence of Darryl Hunt. The conversation will explore the hopes and challenges of American democracy through Black stories.

Faladé’s novel, Black Cloud Rising, features the experiences of the Union army’s African Brigade in northeast North Carolina during the Civil War. He also wrote the narrative history, Fire on The Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers, and the screenplay for the documentary, Rescue Men: The Story of the Pea Island Lifesavers, about the nation’s first and only all-black Coast Guard crew.

Black Cloud Rising was selected by the New York Times and the New Yorker as one of the Best Books of 2022. His first book, Fire on the Beach, was one of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Best Books of 2001. His second, Away Running, was named an Outstanding International Book by the US Board on Books for Young People. Charles Frazier, National Book Award-winning author of Cold Mountain, praised Black Cloud Rising for breathing “life into a revolutionary moment when the US moved a vital step forward toward achieving the ideals we’ve always proclaimed.”

“Richard Etheridge’s story has so much to teach us about race, mixedness, and what it means to be ‘American.'” says Faladé, who is excited to be in conversation with North Carolina audiences about “the lessons we can draw from people like Etheridge.”

Faladé’s essay, “Mixeded: A Son’s Story,” which appeared in The New Yorker in July 2022, places his experience as a biracial Southerner of West African descent, at the center of an exploration of America’s cross-cultural experiment. He teaches at the University of Illinois. Learn more about him and his work at davidwrightbooks.com.