NRCC Library to host book talk and Q&A with local author

Rick Van Noy

New River Community College will host a book talk and Q&A with local author Dr. Rick Van Noy on Tuesday, March 14 at 6 p.m. in Martin Hall at NRCC in Dublin.

Van Noy will discuss his most recent book, “Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South.” The book is based on stories from his travels in the American South, as well as from conversations with government, geological, and conservation experts. “Sudden Spring” “is a portrait of what climate change looks like in specific Southern places to specific people.” Van Noy is an author and professor of English at Radford University.

Van Noy said he wanted to write the book because “the short answer is that I wanted to move it out of abstraction, to bring it down to a local level in ways that real people experience it. Downscaling is a term climate change experts use to bring global forecasts down to community impacts. All of my books look at particular places but with a different kind of mapping. Using techniques of creative nonfiction—including narrative, scene, humor, and dialogue—I try to zoom in on large-scale processes happening at the local level, offering personalized depictions happening both on the ground and beneath the surface.”

The event will include light refreshments and a few copies of the book to give away. The event will be held in 225A Martin Hall, inside of the NRCC Library on campus.

For more information about the event, contact Sandy Smith in the NRCC Library at ssmith@nr.edu or (540)674-3600, ext. 4345.