My first guest on this month’s Open Book is singer and songwriter Jennifer Daniels. After 25 years of writing and singing songs, Jennifer is now also a novelist. Her second book, written for young adults, is as she put it “a paranormal adventure story” in which one of the two narrators has the ability to shape-shift into a lion. His name is Chowsie. His father is part of the Oglala Lakota tribe in South Dakota where he grew up. The other narrator is Elizabeth, nicknamed Sunbeam and later just Beam. Beam lives in Atlanta, but like Chowsie, Beam’s father is also from the Oglala Lakota tribe in South Dakota. The title of her novel, just published, is The Elixir.
In the program's second half, my guest is poet and playwright, professor and storyteller Peggy Douglas. Peggy, together with her friend Anne Swedberg, has been teaching a class on writing and performing poetic monologues here at UTC. The twelve students in the class will each be performing a monologue they have written based on conversations with people from the community about their lives in the Guerry Center Reading Room on April 25th at 5 pm. Admission is free and open to the public.
