The Long River Home Reading in Downtown Delaware

Larry Smith will read from his recently published novel, The Long River Home, on Thursday, October 22, at 7:15 p.m. in The Beehive Bookstore in beautiful downtown Delaware, Ohio.

The Long River Home is published as part of the Working Lives Series for Bottom Dog Press. The novel is about the people and places of the Appalachian foothills in and around Ohio’s Green, Vinton, and Jefferson Counties, stories of Smith’s family from generations past. It has been nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize.

Annabel Thomas, Ohio author of Stone Man Mountain says of Mr. Smith “in this fine Appalachian novel, Larry Smith chronicles four generations of McCalls, their joys and sorrows, their sins and their nobility … Such regional fiction has always been about people: their connections with one another, their home place, their struggles to survive and to prosper. It’s all here, set, in the grand tradition of Wendell Berry and Conrad Richter, against the Ohio landscape: its hills and its rivers, its frontier beginnings and its later industrial development. We care about the place and its people. Finishing the novel, we understand ourselves and our nation with a deeper knowledge.”

Smith has worked as a steel mill laborer, a high school teacher, a college professor, and a writer and editor. A graduate of Mingo Central High School, Muskingum College, and Kent State University, he is the author of seven books of poetry, a book of memoirs, two books of fiction, two biographies of authors Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Patchen, and two books of translations from the Chinese.

Now a professor emeritus of Bowling Green State University’s Firelands College, he is the director of the Firelands Writing Center there and of Bottom Dog Press. Smith has received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, and a Fulbright Lectureship in American Literature to Italy.

Robert Flanagan will introduce the author.

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