Historical fiction thriller Steve Berry to headline 2022 Southern Voices Festival

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Steve Berry, a regular at the top of The New York Times, USA Today and Indie bestseller lists, will be the keynote speaker at the 2022 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library, library officials said.

Berry was scheduled to be the keynote speaker in 2018 but had to cancel the day before he was supposed to speak after coming down with the flu.

Library officials are excited to line him up again for 2022, said Carrie Steinmehl, chairwoman for the festival, which will be Feb. 23-26. Berry is slated to speak on Friday, Feb. 25.

Writers coming to the authors’ conference on Saturday, Feb. 26, are Jason Mott (who just won the National Book Award for fiction last month), Jennifer Egan, Rachel Hawkins, Signe Pike, Peter Swanson and Kevin Wilson.

The musical feature for 2022 is the Live From Laurel Canyon show, a 90-minute retrospective of music and stories of some of the most influential artists of the 1960s and 1970s. The show, created by composer Brian Chartrand, is scheduled for Feb. 23-24.

The featured artist for the 2022 festival is quilter Cathy Fussell of Columbus, Georgia, who will give a free lecture at the library on Feb. 10.

Steinmehl said library officials are especially excited for the 2022 festival because the 2021 festival was canceled due to COVID-19. The 2020 festival was held just a few weeks before Gov. Kay Ivey declared a state of emergency that prohibited large gatherings of people.

Steinmehl said while library staff are excited to be able to proceed in 2022, they’re also a little nervous because they don’t know what type of crowd to expect, given the ongoing pandemic.

“People are feeling a little more confident in going to events, so it’s picking up,” she said, noting that several shows for the Hoover Library Theatre’s 2021-22 season have sold out already.

She believes people will buy tickets to the Southern Voices Festival, “but you never know until they go on sale,” she said.

Tickets go on sale Jan. 18.

Because of the uncertainty for 2022, the library initially plans to sell only 250 tickets for the Saturday authors’ conference, and all of those will be in the Library Theatre, Steinmehl said. In recent years, the library has sold 250 tickets for the theater and had about 100 tickets available for the Library Plaza, with authors speaking in both locations at different times.

If the theater sells out this time, the library will maintain a waiting list and open up the Plaza if there is enough demand, Steinmehl said.

The format for the day will remain the same, with authors speaking both in the morning and the afternoon, with a lunch break in the middle and a book signing session at the end of the event.

All of the authors for the 2022 festival are fiction writers, and all of them will be first-time speakers at Southern Voices, except Berry, who spoke at the festival in 2005 after publishing his first novel, “The Amber Room.”

Berry, who writes historical fiction thrillers, now has had 20 novels published, 16 of which are a series of stories about a character named Cotton Malone, a retired top operative for the U.S. Justice Department who keeps getting called back into action to prevent international disasters.

Berry’s latest novel was “The Kaiser’s Web,” which tells a fictional story of two candidates vying to become the chancellor of Germany in 1945 and delves into whether Adolph Hitler and his wife, Eva, actually died in a bunker deep below Berlin and what happened to billions of dollars of Nazi wealth in the waning days of World War II.

He has another book due out in June called “The Omega Factor,” a stand-alone novel about a new character named Nicholas Lee, whose job is to protect the world’s cultural artifacts for the United Nations’ Cultural Liaison and Investigative Office. Berry likely will talk about “The Omega Factor” at Southern Voices, Steinmehl said.

Berry, who was a trial lawyer for 30 years, also has written 11 e-book originals. He includes a lot of history in his writing and with his wife, Elizabeth, created a foundation called History Matters that is dedicated to historic preservation.

A native of Georgia, he has been named Writer of the Year both in Georgia and in Florida. He is an emeritus member of the Smithsonian Libraries Advisory Board and a founding member of the International Thriller Writers.

Here’s a bit more about each of the authors chosen for the Saturday authors’ conference, based on information provided by the Hoover Public Library and the authors’ websites and social media accounts:

JASON MOTT

Mott in November won the 2021 National Book Award for fiction for his latest novel, “Hell of a Book," which tells the story of an African American author who sets out on a cross-country book tour to promote his bestselling novel, as well as the stories of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possible imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

The book is “a story that goes to the heart of racism, police violence and the hidden cost exacted upon Black Americans and America as a whole,” according to Mott’s website.

Mott’s debut novel, “The Returned” was optioned by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, as a TV series called “Resurrection,” which premiered on ABC in 2014.

Mott, who has a total of four novels and two poetry collections, currently lives in southeastern North Carolina. His poetry and fiction have appeared in various literary journals. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize award, and Entertainment Weekly listed him as one of 10 "New Hollywood: Next Wave" people to watch.

JENNIFER EGAN

Egan, who was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for her novel “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” which tells the story of an aging former punk rocker and record executive and a passionate, troubled young woman he employs. The book also won the National Book Critics Circle Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Egan’s novel “Look At Me” was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001, and her book “The Invisible Circus” was made into a movie featuring Cameron Diaz in 2001.

Her 2017 novel “Manhattan Beach” won the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was chosen as the book for all New Yorkers to read as part of the “One Book, One New York” campaign in 2018.

Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney’s and other magazines, and she recently completed a term as president of PEN America.

Egan also is a journalist and has written frequently for New York Times Magazine. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award and a story called “The Bipolar Kid” received an award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness for outstanding science and health reporting in 2009.

Her latest book, “The Candy House,” tells the story of the owner of a tech company whose technology allows people to access every memory they’ve ever had and to share those memories in exchange for access to the memories of others.

RACHEL HAWKINS

Born in Virginia and raised in Alabama, Hawkins is a New York Times bestselling author of multiple books of teens, most notably the Hex Hall series.

Her first adult novel “The Wife Upstairs,” is a reimagining of Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” set in modern-day Birmingham and was an Amazon.com Editor’s pick and recently named a finalist for the 2021 Goodreads Choice Award for best mystery and thriller.

The Southern Review of Books places “The Wife Upstairs” “definitively within the contemporary female-centered domestic noir thrillers such as Liane Moriarty, Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins and A. J. Finn” while also evoking “gothic tales like Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca.’”

Hawkins is a graduate of Auburn University and taught high school English for three years before becoming a full-time writer. She also writes under the name Erin Sterling.

One of her Erin Sterling books, “The Ex Hex” is a finalist for the 2021 Goodreads Choice Award for best romance book.

Her latest novel, “Reckless Girls,” is scheduled to be released in 2022.

SIGNE PIKE

Pike worked as an editor at Random House and then Penguin before publishing her first book, a travel memoir entitled “Faery Tale: One Woman’s Search for Enchantment in a Modern World."

She has since spent more than a decade researching Celtic history and folklore, which she used in her “Lost Queen” series, a historical series that has recently been optioned for TV.

“The Lost Queen reveals the story of Languoreth, a powerful and forgotten queen of sixth century Scotland. The series has been described as “Outlander meets Camelot” and “’The Mists of Avalon’ for a new generation.”

Author Patti Callahan Henry hailed the first book as “an extraordinary historical page-turner.” The second, “The Forgotten Kingdom,” was released this year, and the third book in the series is scheduled to come out in the fall of 2023.

For the past 12 years, Signe has lived in Charleston, South Carolina, where she writes full time.

PETER SWANSON

Swanson, a mystery thriller writer, is a Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of seven novels, including “The Kind Worth Killing,” which won the New England Society Book Award and is a finalist for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger.

Another book, “Her Every Fear” was a National Public Radio Book of the Year, and his most recent, “Every Vow You Break,” was described by The Wall Street Journal as being reminiscent of films such as “Vertigo” and “Fatal Attraction.”

Swanson’s stories, poetry, and features have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Atlantic Monthly, Measure, The Guardian, The Strand Magazine and Yankee Magazine.

He is a graduate of Trinity College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Emerson College, and he lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts with his wife and cat. His latest book, “Nine Lives,” is scheduled to be released in March 2022.

KEVIN WILSON

Wilson, a literary fiction writer, is the author of two short story collections and three novels.

His first short story collection, “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth,” received an Alex Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. Wilson’s fiction has appeared in four volumes of “New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best Anthology” and in “The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012.”

His first novel, “The Family Fang,” was made into a movie of the same name and starred Jason Bateman, Nicole Kidman and Christopher Walken. His latest novel, “Nothing to See Here,” is about twins who spontaneously combust and has been named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, People, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, TIME and Buzzfeed.

The Library Journal calls “Nothing to See Here” “a love letter to the weirdness and difficulties of children and parenting.”

Wilson lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife and children, where he is an associate professor in the English Department at The University of the South.

LIVE FROM LAUREL CANYON

This show, scheduled to be performed at the Library Theatre on Wednesday and Thursday, Feb. 23-24, features the music and stories of artists such as The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Carole King, James Taylor, The Mamas & the Papas, Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and Jim Morrison.

All of those artists lived in Laurel Canyon, a neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills region of the Santa Monica Mountains, from 1965 to 1976.

Described as much more than a “tribute” act, Live from Laurel Canyon not only includes performances of the music of those artists, but it takes the audience on a journey through the stories that inspired the songs.

THE ART OF CATHY FUSSELL

A quilter for more than 50 years, Fussell maintains a studio in Columbus, Georgia, where she produces both hand-quilted and machine-quilted pieces.

She makes traditional quilts, art quilts and modern quilts, and she sometimes salvages vintage quilt tops. Fussell often collaborates with a family member during the design phase. She sometimes exhibits work in shows, and she occasionally teaches a class. She is constantly evolving as a quilter.

In 2011, Fussell retired from a 28-year career teaching literature and composition, first at the high school level and later at Columbus State University. For the last eight years of her tenure, in addition to teaching, she directed the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians.

Since her retirement, Fussell has devoted herself full time to quilting. She particularly enjoys incorporating literary and geographical themes into her quilts.

The Hoover Public Library will showcase her work during Southern Voices but plans to have an opening event from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 10, with Fussell giving a lecture at 6 p.m.

2022 SOUTHERN VOICES SCHEDULE:

Feb. 10 — Quilter Cathy Fussell, 5:30-7:30 p.m. on the theater level; free and open to the public; lecture at 6 p.m.

Feb. 23-24 — Live From Laurel Canyon, 7:30 p.m. each night in the Library Theatre; already sold out

Feb. 25 — An Evening with Steve Berry, 7 p.m. in the Library Theatre; $40 per person (limit of six tickets per person); reserved seating; reception included

Feb. 26 — Authors conference, 9 a.m.-4 p.m. in the Library Theatre; $45 per person; reserved seating; lunch on your own, but attendees may pre-order a boxed lunch from East 59 Café by calling 205-518-6264 or by visiting east59.net/southernvoices

TICKET SALES

Tickets go on sale Tuesday, Jan. 18, at 10 a.m. and will be available only online at hooverlibrary.org/sv and by phone at 205-444-7888. No mail orders will be accepted.

Festival organizers expect tickets to sell out early, but as long as tickets are available, they will be sold during regular hours at the Library Theatre box office (10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday through Friday). Accepted forms of payment are cash, check, Visa, MasterCard, Discover or American Express.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Dec. 21 to reflect a change in date for tickets to go on sale. Tickets now will go on sale Tuesday, Jan. 18. Also, the article was updated to indicate that Jennifer Egan will be one of the authors speaking on Saturday, Feb. 26, taking the place of Taylor Jenkins Reid, who canceled her appearance.