Events

Thurs 9/30  7pm-8pm Susan Gregg Gilmore reads from her new novel The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove From Nashville, TN, Susan Gregg Gilmore began her writing career at the University of Virginia as a reporter for the school’s award-winning newspaper.  A year after graduation, she entered graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin where she earned a Master of Arts in American Studies and returned to her writing.  She remembers asking a favorite professor about pursuing a writing career, and he told her she needed to live life first.  So she did.  She married her husband in 1985 has now raised three daughters.  She has made hundreds of cupcakes for bake sales, chaired school book fairs, volunteered in inner-city schools and taught Vacation Bible School all the while writing for papers including the Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor and the Chattanooga News-Free Press.  While on staff at the Free Press, Gilmore wrote a weekly column about parenting in the South. Her first novel, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, is rooted in summer vacations spent with her paternal grandmother and grandfather, a revival-bred preacher, who after church on Sundays, always took his granddaughters to the Dairy Queen.  Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen was called a “stand-out coming of age novel” by NPR’s Alan Cheuse and was a Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) 2009 Book Award Nominee.  Her second novel, The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove is about a young woman searches for love in the most unlikely of places while fighting against the injustice of her time