Available April 3rd, 2018
Book Launch: Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh, NC

Summary

Tacker Hart left his home in North Carolina as a local high school football hero, but returns in disgrace after being fired from a prestigious architectural assignment in West Africa. Yet the culture and people he grew to admire have left their mark on him. Adrift, he manages his father’s grocery store and becomes reacquainted with a girl he barely knew growing up.

On the same morning but at different moments, Tacker and Kate encounter a young African-American, Gaines Townson, and their stories converge with his. As Winston-Salem is pulled into the tumultuous 1960s, these three Americans find themselves at the center of the civil rights struggle, coming to terms with the legacies of their pasts as they search for an ennobling future.

Praise for Swimming Between Worlds

Summary

Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. When Emma Davis reads the words of Isaiah 6:8 in her room at a Georgia women’s college, she understands her true calling: to become a missionary. It is a leap of faith that sweeps her away to Africa in an odyssey of personal discovery, tremendous hardship, and profound transformation.

For the earnest, headstrong daughter of a prosperous slave owner, living among the Yoruba people is utterly unlike Emma’s sheltered childhood—as is her new husband, Henry Bowman. Twenty years her senior, the mercurial Henry is the object of Emma’s mad first love, intensifying the sensations of all they see and share together. Each day brings new tragedy and heartbreak, and each day, Emma somehow finds the hope, passion, and strength of will to press onward. Through it all, Henry’s first gift to Emma, a simple writing box—with its red leather-bound diary and space for a few cherished keepsakes—becomes her closest confidant, Emma’s last connection to a life that seems, in this strange new world, like a passing memory.

A tale of social and spiritual awakening; a dispatch from a difficult era at home and abroad; and a meditation on faith, freedom, and desire.

Praise for A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa

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Summary

Born into a white family of medical missionaries living in Nigeria in 1954 but hailing from the American South, Elaine Neil Orr was given two African names. The hospital staff dubbed the child: Bamidele and Funmilayo. “Bamidele” meant to her mother “born away from home,” but there were other meanings that, in time, the blond gangly girl would learn: “come home with me” or “follow me home” — spoken with arms outstretched, beckoning. “Funmilayo” translates simply: “she brings joy.”

While the U.S. was entering the Civil Rights Movement, Nigeria was in the midst of a national clamor for independence from Great Britain. Nigerian history and details of Yoruba culture Elaine Orr didn’t need to study, since she lived them as a girl.

But when she became herself a young wife and mother with a forward-moving career, she faced diabetes and later kidney failure. As she started her dialysis and patient wait for transplants, she began to live a Yoruba concept held deep in her bones: to journey forward you must journey back.

She realized that only through recovering the homeland she left in her teens, could she find the strength to survive.

Praise for Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life

Excerpt

The Ethiope was a river beyond poetry, iridescent, the water clear as glass, its white sandy bed interrupted at certain depths by rich green river grasses that swayed like the village women dancing. Depending on the angle and time of day, the river’s colors were green and more green, a fluffy white like cotton from the kapok tree, the blue of the woodland kingfisher, or granite beneath a threatening sky. . . . Afternoons at the river were the happiest times I have had—in the company of the people I loved the most—and I believed when I was young that I would live by this river forever, that I would learn to breathe underwater, that I would build a hut by its side, that I would never let it go.

Reviews

Gods of Noonday Best Creative Non-Fiction Book of 2003. – MaximsNews.com, News Network for the International Community.

The Tennessean

— Cori Yonge —
Special to The Register
The Mobile Register/Mobile, AL

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Audible Audio Edition now available!

Summary

Crossing borders and boundaries, countries and cultures, they are the children of the military, diplomatic corps, international business, education and missions communities. They are called Third Culture Kids or Global Nomads, and the many benefits of their lifestyle — expanded worldview, multiplicity of languages, tolerance for differences – are often mitigated by recurring losses of relationships, of stability, of permanent roots. They are part of an accelerating demographic that is only recently coming into visibility. In this groundbreaking collection, writers from around the world address issues of language acquisition and identity formation, childhood mobility and adaptation, memory and grief, and the artist’s struggle to articulate the experience of growing up global. And, woven like a thread through the entire collection, runs the individual’s search for belonging and a place called home. This book provides a major leap in understanding what it’s like to grow up among worlds. It is invaluable reading for the new global age.

Excerpt

When I left Nigeria for good at age sixteen I took my secret passenger, now a stowaway. She was my African self and she was also that hinged double. Now those selves seemed monstrous, illegal. There was no possibility of my joining African-Americans at lunch in the local high school; yet “passing” as white seemed a lie. If the real me “came out,” her thoughts would appear blasphemous, . . I felt myself completely alien but entirely undetected since it was absolutely clear that no one had the least suspicion of who I really was. The ship of passage was my physical body; she—that other one or two—was lodged somewhere deep inside, . . . I looked white; I sounded white. I owned an American passport. I was cataloged.

Praise for Writing Out of Limbo

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