Jackson County Public Library partnered with Western Carolina University, City Lights Bookstore, and Appalachian Women’s Museum to host a celebration of the newly discovered memoir by Wilma Dykeman. Mimi Fenton, professor of English, introduced Wilma Dykeman’s son Jim Stokely III, who discovered the manuscript after Dykeman’s death in 2006. Other speakers included Pam Duncan, Dr. Mae Miller Claxton, Dr. Kim Hall, and former NC Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer.
Family of Earth: A Southern Mountain Childhood focuses on Dykeman’s childhood in Buncombe County during the first half of the twentieth-century. The book features a foreword by fellow author and North Carolinian Robert Morgan.
