Robert Morgan and Sy Montgomery

The Looking Class Rock Writers’ Conference presents authors Robert Morgan & Sy Montgomery. Program starts at 7:30 pm in the Rogow Room at the Library. This event is made possible by the Transylvania County Library Foundation and Brevard College.  Highland Books will have books for sale and signing following the program and there will be a dessert reception in the Library following the program.  
Robert Morgan is the author of fourteen books of poetry, most recently Terroir, 2011, and a collection of new poems, Dark Energy, published in 2015. He has also published nine volumes of fiction, including Gap Creek, a New York Times bestseller. A sequel to Gap Creek, The Road From Gap Creek, was published in 2013 and received the 2014 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. A new novel, Chasing the North Star, was published in 2016. In addition, he is the author of three nonfiction books, Good Measure: Essays, Interviews, and Notes on Poetry; Boone: A Biography; and Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion, 2011.

To research books, films and articles, Sy Montgomery has been chased by an angry silverback gorilla in Zaire and bitten by a vampire bat in Costa Rica, worked in a pit crawling with 18,000 snakes in Manitoba and handled a wild tarantula in French Guiana.  She has been deftly undressed by an orangutan in Borneo, hunted by a tiger in India, and swum with piranhas, electric eels and dolphins in the Amazon. She has searched the Altai Mountains of Mongolia’s Gobi for snow leopards, hiked into the trackless cloud forest of Papua New Guinea to radiocollar tree kangaroos, and learned to SCUBA dive in order to commune with octopuses.  Sy’s 20 books for both adults and children have garnered many honors including The Soul of an Octopus, which was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

The Good Good Pig, her memoir of life with her pig, Christopher Hogwood, is an international bestseller. She received a Presidential Award for Lifetime Achievement from the New England Booksellers Association in 2014 and an American Association for the Advance of Science/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science (for her book TEMPLE GRANDIN) in 2015. Sy is also the winner of the 2009 New England Independent Booksellers Association Nonfiction Award, the 2010 Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award, the Henry Bergh Award for Nonfiction (given by the ASPCA for Humane Education) and dozens of other honors.

Her work with the man-eating tigers, the subject of her book Spell Of The Tiger, was made into in a National Geographic television documentary she scripted and narrated. Also for National Geographic TV she developed and scripted Mother Bear Man, about her friend, Ben Kilham, who raises and releases orphaned bear cubs, which won a Chris award.