Events

Tues 4/13  7pm-8pm Malcolm Jones reads from Little Boy Blues   Malcolm Jones, Cultural Editor at Newsweek magazine, has written a memoir that provides a wonderful view into North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s:  A child surrounded mostly by grandparents, aunts, and uncles born in the previous century, Malcolm Jones finds himself underfoot in a disintegrating marriage. His father is charming but careless about steady work, often gone from home and often drunk. His mother, a schoolteacher and faded Southern belle, clings to the past while hungering for respectability and stability. Jones vividly describes their faltering marriage as it plays out against larger cracks in society: the convulsions of desegregation and a popular culture that threatens the church-centered life of his family. He also recalls idyllic times and the ordinary, easy moments of an otherwise fraught childhood: discovering an old Victrola, attending a marionette show—experiences that offer a portal to other worlds.   Richly evoking a time and place with rare depth of feeling and a penetrating, often bittersweet candor, Malcolm Jones gives us the fundamental stories of a life—where he comes from, who he was, who he has become. Malcolm Jones was born January 8, 1952 in Lancaster, S.C., the only child of Malcolm Jones Sr. and Margaret Floyd Jones, with whom he moved to Winston-Salem, N.C., when he was two.  When he was 12 years old, his parents divorced, and thereafter he lived with his mother until he went to college, first in Florida and then back in North Carolina, where he graduated from Wake Forest University with a BA in 1974.   While still in college, he went to work for the Winston-Salem Journal, starting as an intern writing obituaries and then as a part-time reporter. For the next decade, he worked at several North Carolina newspapers–the Twin City Sentinel in Winston-Salem, the Morning Herald in Durham and the Daily News in Greensboro. For all those papers he wrote editorials, feature stories and book reviews. In 1983, he moved to St. Petersburg, Fla., where he created the book section for the St. Petersburg Times. In 1984, he collaborated with the song writer and composer Van Dyke Parks and the artist Barry Moser on Jump!, a retelling of several Brer Rabbit stories. In 1989, he took a job writing book reviews and other stories in the arts and culture section of Newsweek, where he has worked ever since.  In 1987, he married Robin Lawrence, with whom he has two children, Susannah and Spencer. They live in Croton, N.Y., a small town on the Hudson River not far from New York City.