Welcome to the inaugural writers hour at James Madison university. We are glad you are here. I want to thank the provost, the first person that i post about in this series. The everyone at the communications further help promoting the event. The we wouldnt be here so thanks to you. We also wouldnt be without john grisham. He should have his own show. Before i met him i knew he was generous with his time and money and you cant go three days and i got to know him most would agree he was a gravedigger and never met someone that for their fame so blithely. Hes a regular person. But of course he is a famous writer. In one place that sold a quarter of a billion bucks and another place he sold 300 million so at some point you throw in the towel and say a boatload. This is academia there is no keeping it loose but here we are on stage in academia. Weve probably got john on the cool side of the mountain where he belongs and i hope he becomes a regular visitor. Please welcome our friend and bene
Will be sent said along to ther who answer them at the end of the presentation. Also we encourage you to support todays featured author by purchasing her book from independent book seller, politics and prose. Finally i big thank you goes out to the featured sponsors. The blair family foundation, downtown crowne, and montgomery college. Lets get started. Tonight we have got author casey cep to talk about her bestselling book furious hours murder, fraud, and the last trial of harper lee. She tells the true story of murder, revenge and courtroom drama. Beloved writer harper lee spent years working on telling this story. Now casey cep brings the story to life from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama. Casey cep is a staff writer at the new yorker. After graduating from harvard with a degree in english she earned a master philosophy in theology at the university of oxford as a rhodes scholar. In interviewing case tonight is eugene, an awardwinning veteran journalist who has an eclect
Host ladies and gentlemen. We are all here to welcome the number one New York Times bestseller, across. Many genres including fiction, nonfiction, childrens, howtos, and graphic novels. He helped defined the loss 911 leg at ground zero. And also is the host and decoded. We all know why you are here. Lets welcome mr. Brad meltzer. [applause]. Brad we are here and just do you know, you call after your cameras out pretty cspan is here. Do you know what that means. All of this book nerves are watching are being watched by all of our Favorite Book nerves. And we are nerds. We have as many viewers as spn right now. [laughter]. That junk is not working in sports places. [laughter]. So i to virginia. Obviously this was our home. A beautiful place for us. I started writing here. Its especially important on today, todays the day my dad died. We market today. I know it seems like something sad but i love my father. I especially love being in his barnes noble. My father used to go into our local b
Bookstore in washington, d. C. In 2019. Hello, everyone. Im a member of the event staff and i would like to welcome you all on this cold evening to politics and prose. Just a few quick notes before we get started, cspan is here with us tonight and we are also filming for our own Youtube Channel so if you could take a moment to silence your cell phone please take a moment along the same lines when we get to the q a portion of the event, we have a microphone up over here we want to make sure we keep the dialogue running. Books are available at the register. Also fun and an interesting books that make great gifts to you might want to pick up a couple of those as well which is of course why we are here the secret plot to kill George Washington. Writing history with the same command that made him one of the finest thriller writers he tells the story of the plot to assassinate George Washington. Looking back, he shows the iconic view was brought with uncertainty. It was anything but a sure.
This beautiful sunny day but we appreciate this regardless and we plan to be back and stronger than ever in2021. We had a great series of online events. They are all archived and available for replay at our page and you can click on raven bookstore at the top of this page to get to the list of archived events. A couple other things about how this is going to work. Marie is going to give a short author talk and show us photos from her book and we will open it up to questions. You can ask a question by clicking the ask a question button at the bottom of your screen or click it into the chat window. We appreciate you asking questions to keep the discussion moving and we want this to be a participants event as much as we can in this strange online setting and another thing to note at the bottom of the screen is this button that says buy Americas Harvest here and that will take you to the raven bookstore which we are where we have these in stock or if youre in lawrence we can deliver it to