Harrison Scott Key discusses his memoir The World's Largest Man

Tue 6/7, 7pm:
Harrison Scott Key discusses his memoir The World's Largest Man

with special guest Aaron Belz, author of Glitter Bomb: Poems

Harrison Scott Key was born in Memphis, but he grew up in Mississippi, among pious Bible-reading women and men who either shot things or got women pregnant. At the center of his world was his larger-than-life father a hunter, a fighter, a football coach, "a man better suited to living in a remote frontier wilderness of the nineteenth century than contemporary America, with all its progressive ideas and paved roads and lack of armed duels. He was a great man, and he taught me many things: how to fight and work and cheat and how to pray to Jesus about it, how to kill things with guns and knives and, if necessary, with hammers."

Harrison, with his love of books and excessive interest in hugging, couldn't have been less like Pop, and when it became clear that he was not able to kill anything very well, or otherwise make his father happy, he resolved to become everything his father was not: an actor, a Presbyterian, and a doctor of philosophy. But when it was time to settle down and start a family of his own, Harrison began to view his father in a new light and realized for better and for worse how much like his old man he'd become.

Sly, heartfelt, and tirelessly hilarious, The World's Largest Man is an unforgettable memoir the story of a boy's struggle to reconcile himself with an impossibly outsize role model, and a grown man's reckoning with the father it took him a lifetime to understand.

Harrison Scott Key is a contributing editor for the Oxford American and a professor of English at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, where he lives with his wife and three children. His work has been featured in The Best American Travel Writing and numerous magazines.

Aaron Belz holds advanced degrees from New York University, where he learned the craft of poetry from Allen Ginsberg and Phillip Levins, and Saint Louis University, where he studied comedy and modern American poetry. http://belz.net

Event date: 
Tuesday, June 7, 2016 - 7:00pm
Event address: 
752 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Chapel Hill, NC 27514
The World's Largest Man: A Memoir By Harrison Scott Key Cover Image
$16.99
ISBN: 9780062351500
Availability: Usually Available in 1-5 Days
Published: Harper Perennial - May 17th, 2016

Glitter Bomb: Poems By Aaron Belz Cover Image
$15.95
ISBN: 9780892554317
Availability: Usually Available in 5-9 Days
Published: Persea - June 2nd, 2014