Explore every episode of the podcast 27 Views

It was Day Three of the highly charged Rachel Crook murder trial. The well-liked 71-year-old had mysteriously disappeared from Crook’s Corner, her Chapel Hill fish store, in the late summer of 1951. Her body was discovered the next day outside of town. She had been brutally murdered, and initial reports were that she'd been raped. 

“Bold as Lions” is the fourth and final installment of the Who Killed Rachel Crook? podcast series. Hobart Lee, a bulldozer operator with a history of sexual assault charges, faced the death penalty if found guilty. In a surprisingly abbreviated trial, the jury had listened to a day and a half of testimony from the prosecution’s witnesses, and a day and a half of final arguments before they began deliberating Lee’s guilt or innocence. Like everything else about the trial, even the jury’s deliberations were fast-tracked. After a little over an hour, they delivered their verdict.

This series is narrated by 27 Views podcast producer and writer Elizabeth Woodman. Dramatization in this episode is read by Jim Parker, Randall Roden, Kent Davis, James Rainsford, Sam Coleman, Eryk Pruitt, John Bemis, James Rives, and Tom Rankin. Commentary is by retired North Carolina District Court Judge Alonzo Coleman.

In 1952, bulldozer operator Hobart Lee faced a jury of his peers at the highly charged murder trial of Chapel Hillian Rachel Crook. The previous August, the beloved 71-year-old woman had been found murdered, and initial reports were that she'd been raped. 

In Episode Three of the "Who Killed Rachel Crook" podcast, "Thanks for the Memories," Lee is on trial for his life after a preliminary hearing found probable cause that he had committed the killing, and after an unusual jury selection process. The testimony seems to favor the prosecution. And then there’s a bombshell. 

Who Killed Rachel Crook is a special four-part podcast series. The series is narrated by 27 Views podcast producer and writer Elizabeth Woodman. Dramatization in this episode is read by Nancy Demorest, Jill McCorkle, James Rainsford, Sam Coleman, Jim Parker, Eryk Pruitt, John Bemis, James Rives, Kent Davis, Randall Roden, and Tom Rankin. Commentary by retired North Carolina District Court Judge Alonzo Coleman.

In mid-century Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a beloved 71-year-old woman was found murdered, and initial reports were that she'd been raped. Rachel Crook was a familiar figure around town. She ran a fish store called Crook's Corner. She'd also been pursuing her doctorate in economics at UNC for 20 years. Everyone was mystified. Who in the world would want to harm the well-liked woman?

Who Killed Rachel Crook is a special four-part podcast series. In Episode Two, "Getting Punked," there’s a breakthrough in the murder investigation when the local sheriff arrests a 32-year-old bulldozer driver who had a history of sexual assault. His name is Hobart Lee. No sooner is Lee locked up than the Durham jail where he's held experiences a swatting incident.

The series is narrated by 27 Views podcast producer and writer Elizabeth Woodman. Dramatization in this episode is read by Nancy Demorest, Frances Mayes, Jane Holding, Jill McCorkle, James Rainsford, Sam Coleman, Eryk Pruitt, John Bemis, Pat Revels, and Tom Rankin. Commentary by retired North Carolina District Court Judge Alonzo Coleman.

In mid-century Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Rachel Crook was a familiar figure around town. The 71-year-old ran a fish store called Crook's Corner. That same site, under the same name, would eventually become a celebrated restaurant. But back in the Forties and Fifties, Crook's was a modest shop, selling fish, fabric remnants, pecans, and featuring the town’s first laundromat. Rachel Crook worked there every day, and after hours she retired to a small apartment in the back to spend the evening writing her dissertation in economics. She'd been pursuing a doctorate at UNC for 20 years.

On August 29th, 1951, Rachel Crook mysteriously disappeared. Her body was discovered the next day outside of town. The woman had been brutally murdered, and initial reports were that she'd been raped. 

Who Killed Rachel Crook is a four-part podcast series. Episode One, "Citizen Crook," introduces listeners to the fascinating, quirky and self-determined Rachel Crook, and to the town's reaction to her killing. It examines the media coverage of this well-liked woman who defied labelling. 

The series is narrated by 27 Views podcast producer and writer Elizabeth Woodman. Dramatization in this episode is read by Jane Holding, Jill McCorkle, James Rainsford, Sam Coleman, Eryk Pruitt, John Bemis, Pat Revels, and Tom Rankin.

Keeping deer out of a garden is a challenge. But at Montrose, the famous and expansive gardens in Hillsborough, North Carolina, it required an installation of tall fencing, followed by a coordinated effort to drive the lingering deer through the garden gates. There is an art to it, and novelist Craig Nova, a veteran deer driver, led the way.

Craig Nova is the author of a memoir, Brook Trout and the Writing Life, and fifteen novels, including The Good Son and All the Dead Yale Men. His most recent book is Double Solitaire. He is the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harper-Saxton Prize (previous recipients have been James Baldwin and Sylvia Plath), multiple awards from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and other prizes. Craig’s work has appeared in the Paris Review, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Men's Journal, Best American Short Story series, and other publications. He is also a screenwriter who has worked for various film producers. In 2018, his novel, Wetware, was adapted to the big screen. Craig lives in Hillsborough.

Writer Celia Rivenbark reaches back to her high school days to explore the humor and challenges of waiting tables at her small town’s only sit-down restaurant. It served the best food in town, and featured the most elaborate salad bar east of Raleigh. It also came with a sizeable portion of unapologetic Lost Cause nostalgia. It might have been 1974, but social change, and extending a warm welcome to Yankees passing through on their way to Florida, were not necessarily on the menu.

Humorist Celia Rivenbark was born and raised in Teachey, North Carolina, just down the road from Wallace, NC, and Norris’s Restaurant. She began her writing career at age twenty, when she was hired as a reporter and jack-of-all-trades for the Wallace Enterprise. From there she went on to the Wilmington Star News after an editor read a story she wrote for the Enterprise about the rare birth of a mule. She eventually began writing a weekly humor column that became widely syndicated. It continues to this day, but now with a more political bent. Celia is a New York Times best-selling author who has published seven books, including We're Just Like You, Only Prettier; You Can't Drink All Day, If You Don't Start in the Morning; and most recently, Rude Bitches Make Me Tired. She wrote the essay, “Grape Expectations on Highway 17,” for Eno Publishers’s The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food, as well as the the Introduction to Eno Publishers’s anthology, 27 Views of Wilmington: The Port City in Prose & Poetry. Celia has written or co-written a number of plays, including a stage adaptation of “Rude Bitches,” which won Best Original Play at the annual Wilmington Theater Awards, and a rollicking political comedy, “High Voter Turnout,” staged at historic Wilmington’s Thalian Hall in 2023.

Journalist Hal Crowther is a connoisseur of green places. He has a particular reverence for trees, sparing neither effort nor expense to keep the beautiful maples and hickories in his yard as healthy and as upright as possible. When he’s overwhelmed by politics, Hal heads outside. Back inside, he’s still writing up a Menckenian storm about the state of things.

Hal Crowther is the author of six books: An Infuriating American: the Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken, and five collections of essays, including Cathedrals of Kudzu, Gather at the River, and Unarmed But Dangerous. His most recent book, Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers, won the Independent Publishers gold medal for Creative Non-Fiction. Hal was a media editor and critic for Time and Newsweek magazines, a film and drama critic for the Buffalo News, and executive editor of The Spectator in Raleigh. He has several writing credits for film and television. His books and essays, and his syndicated column for the Spectator and the Independent Weekly, have won various prizes, including the H.L. Mencken Writing Award, the Lilian Smith Book Award, and three Pushcart Prizes. He is married to novelist Lee Smith. They live in Hillsborough, North Carolina, surrounded by a yard full of well-tended trees.

Diya Abdo has settled into life in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s thousands of miles from Jordan, where she, the daughter of Palestinian refugees, was raised. A professor at Guilford College, Diya is working hard to reshape the refugee experience in America. She is challenging university campuses everywhere to step up and host families fleeing war and violence around the world. It stems from her own experience, as well as her belief in radical hospitality and radical accountability. Every Campus a Refuge, the program she founded, is changing hearts and minds.

Diya Abdo is the Lincoln Financial Professor of English at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC. She is a second-generation Palestinian refugee, born and raised in Jordan. Her teaching, research, and scholarship focus on Arab women writers, Arab and Islamic feminisms, and refugee studies. She writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her book, American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience, was selected as a North Carolina Reads 2024 Book. In 2015, Diya founded Every Campus a Refuge (ECAR), which advocates for housing refugee families on college and university campus grounds and supporting them in their resettlement. The flagship chapter at Guilford College has hosted nearly 90 refugees thus far. Diya is the recipient of several awards, including the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s Innovation Prize. Diya contributed her story, “Food and Other Weapons,” to Eno Publishers’ anthology The Carolina Table. She also contributed an essay to 27 Views of Greensboro. She lives in Greensboro with her partner, two daughters, and four cats.

Poet Michael McFee talks about his anticipation of winter ending and spring beginning when he strolls through Coker Arboretum on the UNC–Chapel Hill campus. The harbinger of spring is the First Breath of Spring, also known as Lonicera fragrantissima, or winter honeysuckle—also known as “a gorgeous weed.” Michael talks about his years of visiting the arboretum, “the Central Park” of Chapel Hill, and the importance of paying attention, which is at the heart of all writing.

Michael McFee earned his B.A. (1976) and M.A. (1978) from UNC–Chapel Hill. He left graduate school to work a variety of jobs—editorial assistant, librarian, and freelance journalist among them—while he completed his first book. After it was published, he taught part-time at N.C. State University and  UNC–Greensboro. In the late 1980s, McFee was poet-in-residence at Cornell University, and also at Lawrence University. He began teaching at UNC–Chapel Hill in 1990, where he is now Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program. In 2018, McFee was awarded the North Carolina Award for literature, the state's highest civilian honor.

Much of McFee's work deals with his native North Carolina mountains. His book of poems Earthly (University of Chicago Press, 2001) was co-winner of the Roanoake-Chowan Award for Poetry from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society, and was an honorable mention for the Poets' Prize; his next collection, Shinemaster (University of Chicago Press, 2006), won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award from the Western North Carolina Historical Association. He also wrote a book of one-line poems, The Smallest Talk (Bull City Press, 2007); That Was Oasis (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012); We Were Once Here (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017); and A Long Time to Be Gone (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022).

Journalist Paul Cuadros has written a lot about the Latino communities of North Carolina. He moved here more than 25 years ago to write about life in Siler City, a small town in the central part of the state that was experiencing a seismic demographic shift. When Paul joined the faculty of the journalism school at UNC–Chapel Hill, he got to know another Latino community, when he headed each day to the lunch counter at Sutton’s Drug Store. There, the cocineros have become as much a Chapel Hill institution as the drug store itself.

Journalist Paul Cuadros is the author of the story “The Cocineros of Franklin Street,” featured in 27 Views of Chapel Hill, published by Eno Publishers. Paul is an award-winning investigative reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Time, and other national and local publications. He has focused on issues of race and poverty in America. In 1999, he won a fellowship with the Alicia Patterson Foundation, one of the most prestigious in journalism, to report on emerging Latino communities in rural poultry-processing towns in the South. The culmination of this reporting was his book, A Home on the Field: How One Championship Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America, which tells the story of a predominantly Latino high school soccer team as Siler City grapples with Latino immigration.

A Home on the Field was the summer reading selection at UNC–Chapel Hill in 2009, as well as at other universities in North Carolina and beyond.

A professor of journalism at UNC–Chapel Hill, Paul is co-recipient of the 2006 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Journalism Award for his contribution to the radio series “North Carolina Voices: Understanding Poverty,” broadcast on WUNC. He has won the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Award for Online Reporting, and the UNC Diversity Award in 2012 for his work on campus, opening doors for minority students, faculty, and staff.

He was involved in a documentary film and episodic series based on his book, chronicling the lives of Latino youth on the soccer team he coaches in Siler City. He is working on his second book on migration.

It’s that time of year when we remember Hillsborough’s favorite self-taught mortician, RWB Latta (aka writer Allan Gurganus). Now retired, he offered trick-or-treaters a coffin full of candy, and his sales pitch promising deeply discounted and artistic funeral services, with examples galore of his work. To clinch the deal, he treated potential clients to a mash-up of skits, full of fright and politics and frightful politics. The crowds couldn’t get enough. 500 souls lined up each year. For more than a quarter-century on All Hallow’s Eve, the spookiest and most overrun place in town was the Latta funeral home, which took possession of writer Allan Gurganus’s otherwise-respectable bungalow.

Novelist Allan Gurganus has been delighting reading audiences for decades. His books include The Practical Heart, Plays Well With Others, Local Souls, White People, and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which has been adapted for both stage and screen. Many of his short stories have been published in The New Yorker. He recently published The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus, and is at work on a new novel, The Erotic History of a Country Baptist Church. 

In a world of "boomburbs" and generic downtowns, Hillsborough, North Carolina, stands out. Cohesive, walkable, its streets lined with 250 years of architectural styles, the town has gone from sleepy to vibrant in the last 20 years. Journalist Bob Burtman lives and works there, and keeps a watchful eye for storm clouds on the town’s horizon. 

A veteran investigative journalist and radio DJ, for the past eight years Bob Burtman has combined his passion for both as co-founder and president of WHUP, a community radio station in Hillsborough. Bob hosts the station’s local news show five mornings a week, as well as a Sunday night music show, “Roots Rampage.” Bob’s early career revolved around jobs that provided free LPs, such as writing music reviews, which evolved into a full-time journalism job with the Independent Weekly (now called Indy Week). During his tenure at the Houston Press from 1995-2001, he won numerous state and national honors for his long-form stories about criminal justice, the environment, local politics, and people behaving badly. His freelance work has appeared in The Nation, Mother Jones, and other publications. After interest in local and regional journalism waned, Bob turned his focus to investigative research for private clients. When not at the WHUP studios, he can often be found kicking back and listening to music from his record collection, which reflects his long-time obsession with vinyl.

Retired judge Beverly A. Scarlett recounts her life in the small Southern town of Hillsborough, North Carolina—from Jim Crow, through the tumultuous years of school desegregation, to her successful judicial career. Scarlett digs deep into the town’s past and her family’s roots along the Eno River, and discovers the complicated place she calls home. 

A lifelong resident of Hillsborough, Beverly A. Scarlett is a retired attorney and prosecutor. She served several terms as district court judge for Orange and Chatham Counties, the first African-American woman so elected. She now heads Indigenous Memories Incorporated, a nonprofit organization she founded to explore and preserve the land and memory of her ancestors, including their sacred burial grounds. Scarlett is a contributing author to Eno Publishers’s anthology 27 Views of Hillsborough: A Southern Town in Prose & Poetry. 

Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, young Daniel Wallace was drawn to William Nealy’s world. William was brilliant, talented, a maverick, an adrenaline junkie. He was the boyfriend of Daniel’s sister Holly. Daniel had been pegged to take over the family’s successful import/export business, a role he instinctively knew he wasn’t cut out for. William became like a brother to him, showing him how to live a creative and fulfilling life outside the mainstream. Daniel’s new book, This Isn’t Going to End Well, is a personal narrative of their decades-long friendship, its ups and downs, and how he unraveled and ultimately accepted William’s deeply obscured but very real shadow self.

Daniel Wallace is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of six award-winning novels, including Big Fish, Extraordinary Adventures, and Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician. Big Fish, his first novel, was made into a film directed by Tim Burton and was also adapted into a Broadway musical.  He has also written and illustrated a children’s book, The Cat’s Pajamas. This Isn’t Going to End Well, published by Algonquin, is his first work of nonfiction. He wrote the introduction to 27 Views of Chapel Hill, and his work is featured in the anthology, The Carolina Table, both published by Eno Publishers. Daniel is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Sir Walter Raleigh Award, the Harper Lee Award, and the Alabama Author Award. He is a prolific cartoonist.

The vegetables on the Moore family’s supper table, along with the potatoes and the fish, more often than not had been harvested and/or caught, cleaned, and cooked by the family themselves. Lenard D. Moore— now a poet, a gardener, a writer, a lover of jazz—learned early the value of reaping what you sow, in the best and most literal sense. Food on the table was the result of teamwork. Lenard’s fascination with words, his connection with earth and garden, took shape when he was growing up in Eastern North Carolina. There he learned about the summer garden, and by age 12, he took charge of prepping, planting, and maintaining his family’s summer vegetable patch. At the same time, he became interested in the written word. To him, poetry and gardening are interwoven.

Writer and poet Lenard D. Moore grew up in Eastern North Carolina, the inspiration for his story “An Onslow County Tradition,” which was featured in the anthology, The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food, published by Eno Publishers. Lenard is an award-winning poet who writes in various poetic forms. He has been writing haiku for more than 40 years, and was the first Southerner and African American to be elected president of the Haiku Society of America. He writes and publishes fiction and nonfiction. Lenard has published several books, including The Open Eye and Forever Home. His most recent book is entitled A Million Shadows at Noon, published by Cuttlefish. Lenard is founder and director of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective. He is also a contributor to 27 Views of Raleigh: The City of Oaks in Prose & Poetry, and The Elizabeth Keckley Reader, both published by Eno. His work is featured in All the Songs We Sing: Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Carolina African American Writers' Collective.

When author Jill McCorkle reaches back to her earliest memories, she is a toddler sitting in her grandmother’s kitchen sink taking a playful bath. She remembers the smell of good things baking in the oven, the carefully tended African violets that line the windowsill, the sound of her grandmother humming, and the sight of a bright red, polka-dotted bowl on a nearby shelf. Growing up in Lumberton, North Carolina, young Jill always gravitated to the world of her kind, gentle, and wise grandmother.

Jill McCorkle's career as a writer is the stuff of legend: her first two novels—The Cheer Leader and July 7th—were published on the same day in 1984, when she was in her mid-twenties. She has now published twelve novels and short story collections, most recently the highly acclaimed novel, Hieroglyphics. She has received numerous awards, and in 2018 was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. Jill’s work is included in Eno Publishers’s anthology, The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food, and she also contributed to Eno’s 27 Views of Hillsborough. She was featured on a previous episode of the 27 Views podcast: Episode 5, “Hunting Down Stories With Jill McCorkle.”

Bridgette Lacy knows her tomatoes. She was indoctrinated at an early age, when her grandfather would shower her family with plump tomatoes he grew in his garden. Come July, young Bridgette looked forward to tomatoes for lunch, dinner, and even breakfast. Fast-forward to Bridgette Lacy, popular features writer at the News and Observer in Raleigh. There she was introduced to the unofficial summer holiday: Mater Day. She’s been observing it ever since.

Bridgette Lacy’s story, “Mater Day,” was featured in the anthology, The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food, published by Eno Publishers. Bridgette is the publicist for Blair, a regional book publisher. She is a seasoned communicator, an award-winning journalist, and a publicist with a breadth of experience. She is former media relations manager for the North Carolina Arts Council and served as a longtime features writer for the News & Observer in Raleigh. She's the author of Sunday Dinner, a part of the Savor the South series by UNC Press. That title was a finalist for the Pat Conroy Cookbook Prize. Bridgette is a contributor to 27 Views of Raleigh: The City of Oaks in Prose & Poetry, published by Eno. She also is a contributor to All the Songs We Sing: Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Carolina African American Writers' Collective, which was published by Blair. Her work has appeared in Our State, Salt, and O.Henry magazines.

When writer Michael Malone moved back to his native North Carolina, he discovered that fiction came pouring out of him, as did other creative pursuits—plays, songs, imaginative parties, and fundraisers. He was the impresario the small, formerly quiet town of Hillsborough had been waiting for. Among the work inspired by his new hometown was a young adult (YA) story, entitled “Uncle Tatlock and the Town Clock.” Set in a fictionalized version of Hillsborough, the story explores a small town’s past, from its revolutionary roots, to its Civil War surrender, to its contemporary complications and small victories. The town clock has been through it all.

Michael Malone was the author of 12 internationally acclaimed novels, including the classic Handling Sin; Dingley Falls; Fool’s Cap; and The Four Corners of the Sky. He also wrote the popular “Hillston” mysteries, set in a small North Carolina town. The three novels are narrated by two incompatible Piedmont homicide detectives, Justin Savile V and Cuddy Mangum, who over their years of working together forge a close friendship. Michael also published a collection of short stories, entitled Red Clay, Blue Cadillac, as well as two books of nonfiction, one on American movies, one on Jungian psychology. His television writing credits include daytime dramas on ABC, NBC, and Fox. His stories, essays, and criticism have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The Wilson Quarterly, Mademoiselle, Harper’s, The New York Times, The Nation, The Partisan Review, and Playboy. His short works have often been included in anthologies, and his novels have been translated into many languages. Michael also wrote plays, songs, and poems. Among the many prizes he was awarded over his career are the O Henry, the Edgar, the Writers Guild Award, and an Emmy for ABC’s “One Life to Live,” where he was head writer for nearly a decade. He taught at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and Swarthmore. Most recently, he was a professor in the theater and English departments at Duke University.

His story, “Uncle Tatlock and the Town Clock,” is a young-adult prequel to his novel, The Last Noel. The Tatlock story appears in Eno Publishers’s anthology, 27 Views of Hillsborough: A Southern Town in Prose & Poetry. 

Michael died in August 2022 at the age of 79.

The Lloyd family reunion was, and still is, a summertime ritual for chef and cookbook author Nancie McDermott. Generations have gathered for over a century in rural Orange County for an afternoon of feasting and visiting. Nancie savors the dishes, the shared experience, and the meaningful connection with her big extended family.

Nancie McDermott has published fourteen cookbooks, most of which are based on the cuisines of Asia and of the American South. Among her books are the award-winning Southern Cakes: Sweet and Irresistible Recipes for Everyday Celebrations; Real Thai: The Best of Thailand's Regional Cooking; and Fruit: A Savor the South Cookbook. A North Carolina native, Nancie grew up watching her maternal grandmother cook and bake in her dairy farm kitchen. It sold her on the idea of the kitchen being a fun, fascinating lab for creating and playing, a place made for celebration and connection. Her interest in Asian food was inspired by the three years she spent as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand. She has published articles in Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Fine Cooking, and other publications. Her cover story for Southern Living was nominated for a much-coveted James Beard award. Her television appearances include playing the role of cake historian on Alton Brown’s “Good Eats,” on the Food Network; leading Thai market tours on the Discovery Channel; regular appearances on "Hallmark Home & Family"; and video cooking classes for Craftsy.com. Her essay “The Family Reunion” is included in Eno Publishers’ anthology, The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food. Nancie lives with her family in Chapel Hill, in a house with a productive and sometimes-messy kitchen, and a garden where okra, basil, Armenian cucumbers, and lemongrass thrive.

Chef Bill Smith worked in the kitchen at Chapel Hill’s famous Crook’s Corner for 25 years. He talks about foraging for honeysuckle and blackberries on the local bike path, his mostly friendly exchanges with other bike path regulars, and the work of keeping Crook’s Latino kitchen staff safe through the Trump years and the pandemic. 

Bill Smith is the retired chef of the now-defunct Crook’s Corner, considered by many Chapel Hill’s most famous restaurant and one of the most innovative kitchens in the South. Bill is the author of several cookbooks, including Seasoned in the South: Recipes & Stories from Crook’s Corner and from Home, and Crabs & Oysters: A Savor the South Cookbook. He is the 2022 recipient of the Southern Foodways Alliance Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award. He was twice nominated for best chef in the U.S. by the James Beard Foundation, and was that organization’s American Classics Award winner in 2011. Bill was a co-founder of Chapel Hill/Carrboro’s famous Cat’s Cradle music club, which he still frequents. For years he worked hard to help his immigrant co-workers in the Crook's kitchen: He helped them get green cards, obtain passports for their American-born children, and avoid ICE raids and deportation. For those out of work during the pandemic, he spearheaded efforts to pay rent, put food on the table, and keep the electricity on. 

Georgia Carroll was a supermodel in the 1930s, a Hollywood star in the 1940s, and a Chapel Hill resident from the 1950s until her death in 2011. How did this glamorous young woman end up in Tarheel country? Cookbook author and designer Moreton Neal remembers the late Georgia Carroll Kyser, her generosity, her leadership, and her precisely decorated Christmas tree.

Born and raised in Brookhaven, Mississippi, Moreton Neal learned to cook at her grandmother’s knee, and learned to eat well in New Orleans. With Bill Neal, whom she met and married while they were students at Duke University, she opened La Residence, the first fine-dining restaurant of its kind in North Carolina. After leaving the restaurant business, Moreton wrote a cookbook/memoir entitled Remembering Bill Neal: Favorite Recipes from a Life in Cooking, as well as numerous articles for magazines and other publications. For many years, Moreton was the food editor of Raleigh Metro Magazine, and hosted a lifestyle radio talk show called “Better Living.” She continues to write a recipe column entitled “Joyous Cooking” for Chapel Hill Magazine, and to design interior spaces for her clients.

Pecan pie is serious business to Steven Petrow. It’s not just a cherished and delicious family tradition, but also a memory bank of shared gifts, goofs, and changes. Over the years, he has come to appreciate the value of mixing into each pie a good story, regardless of where it lands on the truth meter. He also attempts to sort out the pronunciation controversy over p-e-c-a-n.

Steven Petrow is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and author. His work regularly appears in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today. He is the author of the best-selling Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Older, as well as Steven Petrow’s Complete Gay & Lesbian Manners and The New Gay Wedding: A Practical Primer. A former president of NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists, Steven is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, the Ucross Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), and the National Press Foundation. In 2017, he became the named sponsor of the Steven Petrow LGBTQ Fellowship at the VCCA, a prize that is awarded annually. Steven lives and bakes in Hillsborough, NC, with his cocker spaniel, Binx Bolling, cheering him on.

Living in neighboring towns in North Carolina’s Piedmont, writers Elizabeth Spencer and Allan Gurganus were close friends for decades. A few months before she died in 2019, he visited her one afternoon to talk to her about her story, “Rising Tide” (featured in Eno Publishers’s 27 Views of Chapel Hill: A Southern University Town in Prose and Poetry). They discussed writing, and how leaving her native Mississippi sharpened her focus on racism.

Elizabeth Spencer was the author of nine novels, including The Voice at the Back Door, The Salt Line, and The Night Travellers, as well as short fiction collections, such as The Southern Woman and Starting Over. Her novella, The Light in the Piazza, was adapted to stage and screen. She also published a memoir, Landscapes of the Heart. She won many awards, and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2021, two years after her death at age 98, Library of America issued a forever-in-print edition of Elizabeth Spencer: Novels and Stories.

Allan Gurganus is an award-winning author whose books includes The Practical Heart, Plays Well With Others, Local Souls, White People, and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. His short stories have been published regularly in The New Yorker, and were recently collected in The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus. He is also the subject of a previous episode of the 27 Views podcast, entitled “At Home With Allan Gurganus.”

Novelist Allan Gurganus tells all… about his beloved home, Sunnyside, in small-town North Carolina. He and Sunnyside have been together for decades, and like most long marriages, it’s had its up and its downs, its joys and sorrows. A celebrated storyteller, Allan reads from his essay, “Old Houses & Young Men” (featured in Eno Publishers’ 27 Views of Hillsborough: A Small Southern Town in Prose and Poetry), and talks about rescuing and restoring an old house and making it his own.

Novelist Allan Gurganus has been delighting readers for decades. His books include The Practical Heart, Plays Well With Others, Local Souls, White People, and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which has been adapted for stage and screen. Many of his short stories have been published in The New Yorker. He recently published The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus, and is at work on a new novel, The Erotic History of a Country Baptist Church.

Gurganus has received numerous accolades and awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Southern Book Prize. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, and adaptations of his work have earned four Emmys.

An autobiography told through food: North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green knows food. Long before the farm-to-table movement took hold in popular culture, the garden was a rite of summer for families everywhere. Jaki's family was no exception. As soon as the garden “came in,” they would spring into action—pick, snap, shuck, peel, rinse, freeze, stew, preserve. At a young age, Jaki learned the power of food, its poetry, its eloquence, its ability to heal, to express love, to comfort. In her essay “Singing Tables,” from The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food, Green tells her life story through food.

Poet Jaki Shelton Green loves to cook, to taste, and to celebrate food, in the same way she writes and celebrates language. She is the ninth Poet Laureate of North Carolina, the first African American and the third woman to be appointed to this post. Forbes Magazine has named Green to the "50 Over 50" list of the most influential women in the nation who are reshaping the face of entertainment and the arts. She is a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, 2014 NC Literary Hall of Fame inductee, 2009 NC Piedmont Laureate appointee, and the 2003 recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature. She teaches documentary poetry at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, and was the 2021 Frank B. Hanes Writer in Residence at UNC–Chapel Hill. Additionally, she received the George School Outstanding Alumni Award in 2021. In 2022, she was appointed as Poet Laureate in Residence at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Her poetry collections include Dead on Arrival, Masks, Conjure Blues, singing a tree into dance, breath of the song, Feeding the Light, and I Want to Undie You. On Juneteenth 2020, she released her first poetry album, The River Speaks of Thirst. Her story “Singing Tables” was published in Eno Publishers’ The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food. She is also a contributor to Eno Publishers’ anthologies 27 Views of Hillsborough: A Southern Town in Prose and Poetry and The Elizabeth Keckley Reader, Volume Two.

Writer Jill McCorkle talks about her afternoon as a non-hunter on a deer hunt; her encounter with Dottie, the rebellious beagle; and the necessity of wearing orange in winter. She also reads excerpts from her short story, “Dog Hunting” (featured in Eno Publishers’ 27 Views of Hillsborough: A Small Southern Town in Prose and Poetry).

Jill McCorkle's career as a writer is the stuff of legend. Her first two novels—The Cheer Leader and July 7th—were published on the same day in 1984, when she was in her mid-twenties. She has now published twelve novels and short story collections, most recently the highly acclaimed novel, Hieroglyphics. She has received numerous awards, and in 2018 was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. Jill’s work is also included in Eno Publishers’ anthology, The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food. 

William Leuchtenburg knows his presidents. The historian is an authority on American presidents, particularly Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Many presidents, including FDR, have traveled to Chapel Hill, Dr. Leuchtenburg’s home. He talks about those visits, the University of North Carolina, and about his collaboration over many years on Ken Burns’ award-winning documentaries. Dr. Leuchtenburg also reads excerpts from his essay, “The Presidents Come to Chapel Hill," featured in Eno Publishers’s 27 Views of Chapel Hill: A Southern College Town in Prose and Poetry.

Historian William Leuchtenburg is the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a leading scholar of the life and career of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as well as other presidents. He has written and co-authored more than twenty-five books, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, and In the Shadow of FDR. In addition, he has contributed many articles to journals and publications over his 80-year career. He is past president of the American Historical Association and other organizations, and has consulted and appeared in many documentaries by filmmaker Ken Burns.

Writer Samia Serageldin talks about growing up in the tumultuous Middle East and immigrating to the U.S., where she realizes the American dream—until one September morning in 2001. Samia discusses navigating her way in a post-9/11 world, and reads excerpts from her story “Muslims in the Cul-de-Sac” (featured in Eno Publishers’s 27 Views of Chapel Hill: A Southern University Town in Prose and Poetry).

Samia Serageldin is a founder and editor of the online magazine, South Writ Large: Stories, Arts and Ideas from the Global South. Her novels are The Cairo House and The Naqib’s Daughter. She is co-editor of and contributor to the anthology Mothers & Strangers: Global Essays on Motherhood from the American South. Samia’s story, “Muslims in the Cul-de-Sac” was originally published in her short story collection, Love Is Like Water. In 2016 Samia was named one of “10 Remarkable Women in Arab American Prose” by Arab America. She is currently working on a novel based on her experience of living through the 2011 revolution in Egypt

Documentarian Tom Rankin balances the demands of academic life with caring for his herd of escape-artist goats. In this episode, he talks about the often-maligned animal and reads excerpts from his story “Raising Goats to Their Rightful Place” (featured in Eno Publishers’ The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food).

Tom Rankin is a goat farmer as well as a noted photographer and documentarian. He was director of Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies for fifteen years, and now directs Duke’s MFA program in Experimental and Documentary Arts. His photographs have been widely exhibited. His books include Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta and Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible.

Writer Randall Kenan had a passion for food. Before he died in 2020, he dropped by for dinner, and stayed to talk about the importance of food in his life, in his upbringing, in literature, in culture, in bridging divides. He revealed his deep fondness for the humble butterbean. He also read excerpts from “The Rooster, the Rattlesnake, and the Hydrangea Bush,” the lead essay in Eno Publishers’s The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food, which he edited.

Bio—Randall Kenan grew up in Chinquapin (population: 86) in Eastern North Carolina, a landscape that illuminated much of his fiction. His fiction includes A Visitation of Spirits, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, and If I Had Two Wings. The last volume was published a month before he died, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. He also was a master of nonfiction, publishing books and essays about an array of subjects, from his deep appreciation of James Baldwin; to his passion for Southern foodways, American history, and pop culture; to his exploration of what it is to be Black in our recently Jim Crow-haunted nation. Randall was editor of, and wrote the lead essay for, The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food, published by Eno Publishers. He also contributed to Eno’s book, 27 Views of Hillsborough: A Southern Town in Prose and Poetry.

Listen to Randall read his entire story “The Rooster, the Rattlesnake, and the Hydrangea Bush,” from The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food 

Randall’s profile page and purchase his books on the Whiting Award website

Purchase The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food (Eno Publishers)