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September 8, 2010

Dalton State announces Fall Fine Arts and Lecture Series events

Submitted by Dalton State College

Dalton State College has announced its fall Fine Arts and Lecture Series events, which include lectures by two popular authors and a spirited performance by a “world music” band.

On Wednesday, Sept. 15, author Inman Majors will be on hand to discuss the craft of writing fiction and will talk about his three novels, “The Millionaires,” “Wonderdog” and “Swimming in the Sky.”

Majors, a professor of English at James Madison University in Virginia, has written novels, poems and scholarly articles, but is best known for his highly-acclaimed “Wonderdog,” a satirical novel that falls into the unofficial canon of “loser lit” fiction, a genre that often features protagonists who are near-sighted, self-destructive malcontents.

“In ‘Wonderdog,’ the protagonist Dev Degraw fits that stereotype perfectly,” says Jane Taylor, director of public relations for Dalton State. “As a recently divorced father, a miserable lawyer and a former child actor of a failed television series, Dev, whose father is the governor of Alabama, is asked to ‘clean up his act,’ which results in a series of hilarious consequences.”

The lecture will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Goodroe Auditorium of Memorial Hall and is, as are the other Fine Arts and Lecture Series events this fall, free and open to the public.

On Friday, Oct. 1, the OGYA World Music Band will perform in the Goodroe Auditorium beginning at 7 p.m.

“This band is known for its capability of performing any genre of music,” says Taylor, noting that the OGYA World Music Band delights listeners with a repertoire that includes reggae, calypso, Latin, jazz, funk, rock ‘n roll, African traditional and contemporary, blues, bluegrass and country.

OGYA, which means “Fire,” is a spirited regional eight-member band that travels throughout the Southeast and beyond with the goal of “making people happy and bringing joy to the world.”

OGYA was formed by Kofi and Rebekah Mawuko in 2004 and had its official debut during the 2006 Riverbend Festival in Chattanooga where concert-goers were overheard commenting, “I couldn’t stop smiling,” “This is happy, inspiring music” and “I’ve never danced like that before.”

The last event in the series will take place on Tuesday, Nov. 9, at 7:30 p.m., also in the Goodroe Auditorium of Memorial Hall.

New York Times best-selling author Sharyn McCrumb will discuss her novels, which include “She Walks These Hills” and “The Rosewood Casket.”

Best known for her Appalachian “ballad” novels, McCrumb has earned several awards and honors, including the Wilma Dykeman Award for Regional Historical Literature, the Chaffin Award for Achievement in Southern Literature and the Appalachian Writers Association Outstanding Contribution to Appalachian Literature Award.

“My books are like Appalachian quilts,” says McCrumb. “I take brightly colored scraps of legends, ballads, fragments of rural life and local tragedy, and I piece them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story, but also a deeper truth about the culture of the mountain South.”

Both “She Walks These Hills” and “The Rosewood Casket” deal with the issue of the vanishing wilderness in the mountains of East Tennessee and North Carolina. “The Ballad of Frankie Silver” is the story of the first woman hanged for murder in the state of North Carolina; “The Songcatcher” is a genealogy in music; and “Ghost Riders” is an account of the Civil War in the Appalachians.

For more information about any of these events, please call (706) 272-4469.

 

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