The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
Library to host author presentation and book reading
CAZENOVIA, N.Y. >> The Cazenovia Public Library will welcome author George Hovis to the community room onWednesday, Nov. 20 at 7 p.m.
Hovis will read from and discuss his debut novel, “The Skin Artist” (SFK Press, 2019).
The morning Bill Becker awakes to find the butterfly tattoo bleeding on his chest, his upwardly mobile life begins its harrowing downward spiral. Exiled from a corporate career and from the failed marriage he left behind in a gated Charlotte community, Bill becomes obsessed with a tattooed dancer named Lucy, who is running from a trauma buried deep in her own past. Lucy and Bill wrap them
selves in new skins of ink, wrought by the same artist, a “shaman” who convinces themthat every design will alter their future. Ultimately, both Bill and Lucy must leave the city and return to the Carolina countryside to confront the skins they have shed many years ago.
Hovis is a native of Gaston County, North Carolina.
His stories and essays have appeared in “The Carolina Quarterly,” “Southern Cultures,” “Mississippi Quarterly,” “North Carolina Literary Review,” and numerous other journals and anthologies.
Hovis is also the author of the monograph “Vale of Humility: Plain Folk in Contemporary North Carolina Fiction” (2007).
He earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he has attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
The author is a Pushcart Prize nominee and former President of the Thomas Wolfe Society.
He currently lives with his wife and their two children in upstate New York, where he is a professor of English at SUNY Oneonta and recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
All events at the Cazenovia Public Library are free and open to the public. For more information, call 315-655-9322 or visit cazenoviapubliclibrary.org.