Wednesday, 7:00 pm EST February 8, 2023
The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed
The Ticket/Voucher option includes a $10 Bookstore voucher, redeemable toward the featured event book on the night of the event. All registrants will receive a link to livestream the event.
The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize-winning author De’Shawn Charles Winslow (In West Mills) returns to celebrate his newest, unforgettable novel, Decent People. A propulsive mystery with crucial social commentary, Decent People is set among the Black community in the fictional town of West Mills. The town is reeling from a triple homicide and the secrets the killings reveal. Award-winning novelist Garth Greenwell joins Winslow for a conversation on this powerful novel about shame, race, homophobia, money, and the reckoning required to heal a fractured community.
In Conversation
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De’Shawn Charles Winslow
De’Shawn Charles Winslow
De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s first novel, In West Mills, was the winner of The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Lambda Literary Award, Publishing Triangle Award, and Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing. He has been featured as a “Writer to Watch” in the New York Times and one of the “Black Male Writers of Our Time” in T, The New York Times Style Magazine. He was born and raised in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and now lives in Atlanta, GA.
Photo Credit: Julie R. Keresztes
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Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell is the author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the 2021 Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he teaches at Princeton University and lives in New York.
Photo Credit: Oriette D’Angelo
Featured Book
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Decent People
By De'Shawn Charles Winslow
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing
In the still-segregated town of West Mills, North Carolina, in 1976, Marian, Marva, and Lazarus Harmon-three enigmatic siblings-are found shot to death in their home. The people of West Mills—on both sides of the canal that serves as the town’s color line—are in a frenzy of finger-pointing, gossip, and wonder. The crime is the first reported murder in the area in decades, but the white authorities don’t seem to have any interest in solving the case.
Fortunately, one person is determined to do more than talk. Miss Josephine Wright has just moved back to West Mills from New York City to retire and marry a childhood sweetheart, Olympus “Lymp” Seymore. When she discovers that the murder victims are Lymp’s half-siblings, and that Lymp is one of West Mills’s leading suspects, she sets out to prove his innocence. But as Jo investigates those who might know the most about the Harmons’ deaths, she starts to discover more secrets than she’d ever imagined, and a host of cover-ups-ranging from medical misuse to illicit affairs-that could upend the reputations of many.
For readers of American Spy and Bluebird, Bluebird, Decent People is a powerful new novel about shame, race, money, and the reckoning required to heal a fractured community.
