Friday, August 12 at 4 p.m., award winning writer Allison Hedge Coke will read and sign books at The Country Bookshop in downtown Southern Pines along with her son Travis Hedge Coke, who is also a well-known writer. Both are currently writers-in-residence at Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, which is down the street from a residence Allison Hedge Coke lived in and worked from as a teenager. The Hedge Coke’s are of Huron, Cherokee, Portuguese, French Canadian, and Irish/Scot heritage.

Allison Hedge Coke came of age cropping tobacco and working fields, waters, waiting tables (Pine Needles Resort & Country Club), and working in factories in North Carolina. She has been a featured guest for numerous national and international conferences and poetry festivals, including world festivals in Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Canada, and Jordan and is a recent Lannan Foundation Resident Fellow.

Among her thirteen books are: poetry volumes Dog Road Woman (American Book Award) and Off-Season City Pipe (Carolina labor poems, Wordcraft Writer-of-the-Year Award), a memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer (AIROS Book of the Month), and a poetry verse play Blood Run. Hedge Coke holds the Reynolds Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and directs the Reynolds Series and Sandhill Crane Migration Literary Retreat & Cranefest.

Travis Hedge Coke is a North Carolina native and his writing has been featured in Sing (University of Arizona Press), The Willow’s Whistle (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), and elsewhere, with readings recorded for The Lumberyard and AWP’s Podcast Series. Founder and Editor of Future Earth Magazine and Associate Editor of the University of Nebraska at Kearney’s Platte Valley Review, Hedge Coke is a regular guest on Let’s Talk Movies and maintains a monthly column, called Pop Mechanics, in Renderwrx Magazine.