Stephen E. Smith is the author of nine books of poetry and prose and is the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry, and four North Carolina Press awards. He lives in Southern Pines, North Carolina and contributes columns, reviews, and features to PineStraw, Walter, and O.Henry magazines and occasionally plays guitar and sings the old songs with friends and neighbors at the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities.

Stephen Smith will be discussing his memoir The Year We Danced at The Country Bookshop on May 7th and we hope you will be able to join us!

With the number of Covid cases increasing and the death toll steadily rising, award-winning writer Stephen E. Smith decided it was appropriate—maybe even necessary—to write about happier, less stressful times. In a box of forgotten files, he rediscovered loose-leaf binders and keepsakes from his first year of college. It had been more than half a century but reading through his course notes, personal observations, and the clippings he’d torn from magazines and newspapers, he pieced together the events, good and bad, tender and tragic, that shaped his freshman year.

Much of what he writes is disarmingly funny, but recalling the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the complexities of find- ing himself a stranger in the South forced him to reassess a period of his life he’d long recalled as carefree. In this vivid and poignant mid-60s memoir, readers come to understand how friendship, a love of language and music, and the bittersweet remembrance of lost love can help sustain us through difficult times.

Praise for Shall We Dance:

“So memorable—and heartwarming to the maximum!”

— Bland Simpson, author of North Carolina: Land of Water, Land of Sky

“This book is a great read. Jaunty, delightful, wonderfully absorbing, impossible to resist. The writing simply shines.”

- Judy Goldman, author of Child: A Memoir

“Smith is a reliably hilarious storyteller.”

-Paul Jones, author of Something Wonderful