Hosts: Dr. Betty Duff and Joan Clemons
Guests: Authors Jean Davison and Lee Smith
Topic: The authors read from their work and a discussion follows.
Jean Davison holds a Ph.D from Stanford University. She is the author of several books, including Agriculture, Women and Land: The African Experience and Voices from Mutira: Change in the Lives of Rural Gikuyu Women. She founded the non-profit organization, IDEA, in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s. The group later merged with Global Exchange. Now retired from teaching at American University, international consulting work, writing, and family are her top priorities. She splits her year between Cape Rosier (Maine) and Austin, Texas. She is a member of the Deer Isle Writers Collective and her most recent publication is The Ostrich Wakes: Struggles for Change in Highland Kenya.
Lee Smith is the author of eleven novels including Oral History, Saving Grace, The Devil’s Dream, and Fair and Tender Ladies as well as three collections of stories. Her novel, The Last Girls, was a New York Times bestseller as well as co-winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. A retired professor of English at North Carolina State, she received an Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999. Her new novel On Agate Hill will be published in October 2006. Lee spends her summers in Castine (Maine).