Join Janet Hurley (Nonfiction, June 2008) in conversation with Sebastian Matthews at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe for the launch of her memoir Glove Shy. This is a hybrid event with limited in-store seating and the option to attend online. The event is free but registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance. This event includes a book signing.

In the 1970s, Janet Hurley’s older brother, Brian, was the teenage boxing protégé of a World Heavyweight Champion who lived in their hometown. Brian was a young man of brilliance and wit. His talents were broad, yet boxing was the path he chose. And, soon enough, family life revolved around his training, his bouts, his future. Olympic medals? A pro career? Glove Shy is a tender-tough memoir, a loving look at how a sport as elemental as boxing can obscure the powerful forces this family never saw coming. But, when one of your own is in the ring, what else can matter? Hurley is a talented writer, with strong and vivid prose, and willing to get in the ring with her own past. Glove Shy is a well-told story of what happens when the blows hit far beyond the ropes.

Janet Hurley was born and raised in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York before coming south to Carolina (the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)for its undergraduate creative writing program. Though it took a while to replace “you guys” with “y’all”, she has lived in the south ever since, most recently in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western NC, where she and her husband David raised their daughter, Maren, and son, Liam.

Sebastian Matthews is the author of the memoir In My Father’s Footsteps (W.W. Norton & Co.) as well as two collections of poetry, We Generous and Miracle Day, both published by Red Hen Press. A third collection, Beginner’s Guide to a Head-on Collision, came out from Red Hen Press in 2017. Along with Stanley Plumly, Matthews is the co-editor of three volumes: The Poetry Blues: Essays and Interviews of William Matthews (University of Michigan Press), Search Party: The Collected Poems of William Matthews (Houghton Mifflin), a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize, and New Hope for the Dead: Uncollected Matthews (Red Hen Press). His poetry and prose have appeared in or on, among others, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Blackbird, The Common, From the Fishouse, Georgia Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Poets & Writers, storySouth, The Sun, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Writer’s Almanac, and Writer’s Chronicle.