Zackary Vernon
The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center will host an evening with Zackary Vernon, author ofthe newly published coastal Carolina coming-of-age novel Our Bodies Electric, on Friday, August 23, at 5:00 p.m., at the Conroy Center (601 Bladen St., Beaufort). Free and open to the public. Books will be available for sale and signing. Please call in advance to reserve a seat for this free event: 843-379-7025.
About the Book and Author:
“In this spirited coming-of-age novel, Zack Vernon vividly renders Josh and his fellow middle-school misfits as they seek understanding and acceptance in a world that wishes only to trap them into a stifling conformity. Our Bodies Electric is poignant and comic, and Vernon’s linking Walt Whitman’s celebration of individuality to the characters adds to the novel’s pleasures.”—Ron Rash, author of The Caretaker, Serena, and In the Valley
“I haven’t heard music so sweet and heartfelt since I first read Lewis Nordan. Imagine a novel that sings like a love-drunk cross between The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Breakfast Club. Now imagine it set in the sweltering heat of lowcountry South Carolina. Now imagine it told in the spirit of Walt Whitman. Now imagine that book in your hands.”—Mark Powell, Hurricane Season and The Late Rebellion
“In Our Bodies Electric, young protagonist Josh navigates the relentless world of ever-watchful parents and oddball friends, forever obsessed and enamored by the endless beauties of All Things Female. Josh is curious, intelligent, and intent on doing what’s right. How could so many plans go wrong? This is one heartrending, comedic coming-of-age novel.”—George Singleton, author of The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs
Tormented by his religious family and the broader conservative community of Pawley’s Island, South Carolina, fourteen-year-old Josh struggles with the pressure to conform to their puritanical standards. As he embarks upon his high school years, Josh meets a supportive cast of eccentric small-town characters, falls in love with his classmate, and becomes obsessed with David Bowie. When Josh’s elderly neighbor gives him a copy of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” he begins to understand his own burgeoning sense of identity. Our Bodies Electric celebrates the exuberance of youth and the joy of finding connections in the most unexpected of places.
Zackary Vernon is a writer and scholar based in Boone, North Carolina. His work has appeared in a range of magazines and journals, including The Bitter Southerner, Carolina Quarterly, and Southern Cultures, and he received the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize from the North Carolina Literary Review. He is an associate professor of English at Appalachian State University.
Learn more about the nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center at www.patconroyliterarycenter.org.
