Main Street Books is pleased to welcome author Alan Michael Parker to the store for a reading and signing of his new novel, Christmas in July. In addition to above average company and literature, there will also be light fare from Carrburrito's.
Alan Michael Parker is the author of eight books of poems, three novels, and editor of five reference works on poetry. Parker teaches at Davidson College, where he is Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English, and in the University of Tampa low-residency M.F.A. program. His awards include three Pushcart Prizes, the 2013 and 2014 Randall Jarrell Award, the North Carolina Book Award, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America.
In his new novel, Christmas in July, veteran author Alan Michael Parker charts the wreckage of a troubled teen in a small town, exposing the residents' secrets and their all-too-human hearts through ten unique voices plucked from suburban Saxon Hills: the bored wife of a senior softball slugger, a socialite with a glitter fixation, a beekeeping hermit, a young runaway who can't outrun her past. At the center of the novel is thirteen-year-old Beatrice Danzig who, in light of her impending death, has changed her name to Christmas. Christmas in July explores each of these people's lives before and after meeting Christmas—as well as Mr. Ramirez's mustache, The Wizard of Oz, cults and terrorists, Brown v. Board of Education, a band named Wagawagawaga, and the mystery of Aunt Nikki, Christmas's guardian, who sleeps in a closet to keep her demons, real and imagined, at bay.