Daniel Wallace

27 Views of Chapel Hill: a Southern University Town in Prose & Poetry Daniel Wallace 1st edition

In 2010, Eno Publishers, based in Hillsborough, North Carolina, published 27 Views of Hillsborough: A Southern Town in Poetry & Prose, with an introduction by Michael Malone and literary contributions from 27 writers including Randall Kenan, Jill McCorkle, Craig Nova, and Jaki Shelton Green. To have a town documented in so many genres by so many skillful practitioners from so many perspectives was a rare phenomenon.

Following the success of that first collection, and in consideration of the multitude of writers that call North Carolina home, Eno Publishers is expanding 27 Views into a series that creates a literary "ode" to each title city or town - literally, a "literary landscape of home."

In the second collection in the series, 27 Views of Chapel Hill: A Southern Town in Prose & Poetry, writers of multiple generations, points of view , and ethnic voices reflect on the rich creative and intellectual atmosphere of Chapel Hill - the hometown of the renowned University of North Carolina and a community that has managed to preserve its distinct sense of place. The collection's essays, short stories, book excerpts, and poetry represent a choir of voices that reflect the social, historic, and creative fabric of Chapel Hill. Daniel Wallace, whose novel Big Fish was published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 1999, introduces this edition and illustrates the book's cover.

The collection casts a wide net around the eponymous university town. It addresses everything from firsthand accounts of civil-rights protests to the post-9/11 experience of an Egyptian writer living in Chapel Hill to a reverie on the scent of "first breath of spring" blossoms in Coker Arboretum to a remembrance of Georgia Carroll Kyser, supermodel from the 1930s and longtime Chapel Hillian. Among the writers represented are Elizabeth Spencer, presidential historian William Leuchtenburg, Wells Tower, Samia Serageldin, Nic Brown, Daphne Athas, Bland Simpson, Mildred Council of Mama Dip's, Alan Shapiro, Moreton Neal, Paul Jones, Karen Parker, and Will McInerney of Sacrificial Poets.