Charm Offensive

Ross White, in conversation with Michael McFee, in celebration of Ross’s debut full-length poetry collection, Charm Offensive.

Copies of Charm Offensive and Michael’s most recent collection, A Long Time to Be Gone, will be available for purchase during the event. You can also preorder your copy.

Note: this event will take place on our second floor, which is up a flight of stairs.

About Charm Offensive:

Charm Offensive, Ross White’s debut poetry collection, explores the space between Dickinson’s directive to tell the truth slant and the universal reality of seeing the truth slant without knowing it. Charting the ways that tenderness can resolve into dissonance and uncertainty can resolve into transcendence, Charm Offensive crackles with the dangers of being alive and the joys of remaining defiant. At turns playful and surreal, exuberant and somber, these poems urge readers to find something new to trust in the world.

About Ross White:

Ross White is the winner of the 2019 Sexton Prize, and author of three chapbooks. He is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and the host of The Chapbook. He teaches creative writing and grammar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

About Michael McFee:

Michael McFee, a native of Asheville and longtime resident of Durham, is the Doris Betts Term Professor of English at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he has taught in the Creative Writing Program since 1990. He is the author or editor of seventeen books, most recently Appointed Rounds: Essays (Mercer University Press, 2018) and We Were Once Here: Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017; A Long Time to Be Gone is his twelfth collection of poetry. Among his honors are the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South, from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the North Carolina Award for Literature, our state’s highest civilian honor.